White Lies ‘To Lose My Life’.
January 15, 2009
In a world where change is the only that’s constant, where the 24-hr rolling news monolith of contemporary media is able to break the butterfly upon the wheel faster than ever before, hip young gunslingers White Lies are able to experience the bittersweet sensation of simultaneously topping every ‘One To Watch In 2009′ chart in Christendom whilst also seeing their feted debut given a unaminous thumbs down in the January reviews. But far from the madding crowd of critics shaking their heads solemnly and scribbling out furious declaimations between knotted little fists, ‘To Lose My Life’ shows sporadic signs of so much more.
Now, White Lies might be sprightly young things, but it sounds like they spent their formative years attending more funerals than weddings – the threesome’s morbid pre-occupation with mortality (see ‘Death’, ‘From The Stars’, ‘To Lost My Life’ etc etc) making it no small wonder that they have managed to stay this side of death long enough to write and record an album. Lead singer Harry McVeigh has stated in recent interviews that the band had been listening to “a lot of Interpol” before it came to recording their debut; listening to the results, this is both a complement and an insult the gloomy NYC godheads.
Channelling the bass-heavy, brooding monochrome of a tweenage Joy Division, White Lies certainly do a commendable turn in hip-shivelling drone pop but invariably proceedings sail just wide of the mark, hamstrung too often by McVeigh’s snigger-inducingly ‘serious’ brand of sixth form poetry. On one hand, you might assume that the poor boy stared into the pitless depths of his tortured soul just slightly too long; on the other, you think that he spent so much time squatting dutifully over the fountain of inspiration that he accidently fell in. Despite their melodrama, lyrics such as “my spirit soars above the trees” (To Lose My Life) and “I leave my memoirs in blood on the floor” (EST) fall flat and are delivered with all the resignation of someone who’s just discovered his library card has expired on the same day that the local brand of Hot Topic has closed – the band unable to come up with anything besides a competent amalgam of their cherrypicked influences.
Which is more than a little unfortunate, because first single ‘Unfinished Business’ is a genuinely anthemic and emotive slice of solemn post-punk soul that boasts a chorus the size of Saturn: there’s just so little here that matches it. Sure, the album betrays a commercially ambitious edge which screams “Look At Me!”, but when you do it just pulls a frowny emo face before going back to applying its black lipstick and pouting into the mirror.
Promising without being particularly good, ‘To Lose My Life’ is, if only in terms of quality, fairly reminiscent of Muse’s first effort: flashes of globe-gobbling greatness peering intermittently through the foggy mediocrity of a band just beginning to find their feet. White Lies appear to have fallen to the old enemy of inflated hype – not necesarily through any fault of their own, but whether they can steer the course and come back better with album #2 remains to be seen.
