Keane Channels Road Rage Into Under the Iron Sea
After the whirlwind success of their debut album Hopes and Fears, Keane set off on a worldwide tour that left them exhausted. "I think we did a tour too many," drummer Richard Hughes says. "It's hard to describe because you get to live this ridiculously amazing life and you get to go on stage and do all this stuff. I think every band experiences it on their first tour, the reality of what they're doing is very sort of strange and it is hard to sort of adjust to."
So when Keane found themselves off the road and back in the studio to make their much-anticipated sophomore release, they were ready for a darker sound - a departure from the soft, piano-driven pop of Hopes and Fears. "The subject matter was not the happiest," Hughes says. "We wanted the music and the sounds we used and the atmosphere on the record to have an intensity that Hopes and Fears didn't have. We wanted to capture that atmosphere and do the songs justice."
The result? An ambitious album entitled Under the Iron Sea to convey the band's post-tour emotional state. "We didn't deal with [touring] very well," keyboardist Tim Rice-Oxley explains. "Rather than talk about things and have them out with fistfights, we sort of did the opposite and just stopped talking about stuff and shut ourselves away. [Lead singer Tom Chaplin's] description of that is sort of shutting yourself under this iron sea. It's sort of an impenetrable barrier of noncommunication."
Even without verbal communication, the members of Keane exhibit impressive musical collaboration on Under the Iron Sea. Known for playing rock music without guitars, Keane has always maximized the collective effect of the few instruments they use - bass, keyboards, drums - while highlighting Tom Chaplin's Thom Yorke-esque falsetto vocals. On Under the Iron Sea, though, they take their instrumental lineup to the next level, experimenting with rougher arrangements and more angst-ridden melodies. Is It Any Wonder, the first single from Under the Iron Sea, opens with a synthesized piano line that strikingly resembles electric guitar. "Tim was trying to get an angry, kind of violent sound from his piano and he was putting it through an amplifier that is only used for guitars," Hughes says. "He was really sort of getting it to almost feedback. It was kind of his take on a Jimi Hendrix riff at the start of the song, to make his piano as visceral as Jimi Hendrix's guitar."
Gone are the days when Keane played sweet piano-laced tunes bound for shopping malls and elevators worldwide. From the dissonant argeggios of Atlantic to the ethereal, bare chords of A Bad Dream, Under the Iron Sea shows off Keane's transition toward musical autonomy and away from being tirelessly labeled as the next Coldplay. "If you hate Coldplay and think we sound like them," says Hughes, "give us a listen because we don't actually!"
Artist Info
Most Popular Songs: Everybody’s Changing, Somewhere Only We Know, Is It Any Wonder
Influences: The Lotus Eaters, U2, R.E.M., Oasis, The Beatles, The Smiths, Queen, Radiohead, Genesis, The Pet Shop Boys, Paul Simon
Cool Quotes
“I find the fact that the guitar has taken over quite weird. The piano’s been around for hundreds of years in various forms and the guitar has been around a much shorter time so it’s quite strange that it dominates popular music to such an extent.” - drummer Richard Hughes
“I think that every great piece of art comes from some kind of tension.” - lead singer and keyboardist Tom Chaplin
“I mentioned in an interview once that I liked a particular brand of biscuits - you know, cookies. And I get given them wherever I go around the world. If I ate all of the biscuits I was given, I would weigh several tons. That’s kind of strange, actually. Wherever I am in the world, I have a reliable supply of this particular type of biscuit.” - bassist Tim Rice-Oxley
More…
- Is It Any Wonder (Video)
- Keane on Wikipedia
- Keane on MySpace
- Keane on iTunes
Albums
- Hopes and Fears
- Under the Iron Sea
- Is It Any Wonder? (single)
- Crystal Ball (single)
- Live Recordings 2004
- Bedshaped, Pt. 2 (single)
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