Keane
Hopes and Fears [deluxe edition] - INTERSCOPE
FILTER Grade: 89%

Released in 2004, Keane’s Hopes and Fears was a bigger success than anyone—especially the East Sussex trio—could have imagined. How did this modest, guitar-less trio manage to tap into the lifeblood of the early 2000s? Namely, on the back of lead-off track “Somewhere Only We Know”—a song that bleeds hope the way a Ken Loach film bleeds misery. Taking off with the piano as lead and Tom Chaplin’s borderline-falsetto, the track zips off into the clouds with a firm enough backbeat so that nobody feels like they’ve gone soft for loving it. The album doesn’t stop there, instead it digs deeper into sincerity and mystical ideas of romance on arms-aloft anthems like “Everybody’s Changing.” Dotted with electronic coloring, the album is a full-length discourse on themes of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” without the Kid A-isms. Now, it’s five years later and deluxe reissue time—rendering this hugely successful album new again with extra love and an extra disc of live sessions and demos. If you loved it the first go around, you’ll love every high and low warble, every emphatic climax and every unpolished nugget of wistful bliss. But if you’re praying for the death of every band who claims Oasis, Coldplay and Jeff Buckley as influences, then you’re probably well aware that you should stay the hell away from this album.