Album: The Thrills

Let's Bottle Bohemia, VIRGIN

By Andy Gill

10 September 2004

The Thrills' follow-up to their acclaimed debut, So Much for the City, follows the course of many sophomore efforts, in reporting on the changed circumstances wrought by a modicum of success. In particular, the dangerous lure of dissipation haunts tracks like "Saturday Night", a blunt denunciation of boorish behaviour, "Our Wasted Lives" and "Faded Beauty Queens", which finds Conor Deasy wondering, "I don't know how we end up here/ Wide-eyed in the money/ With faded beauty queens/ Right before I met you, I had fire in my eyes." It's a situation perhaps best summed up in the single "Whatever Happened to Corey Haim?", in which, whisked along on stalking clavinet and sleek soul strings, the narrator admits his ambitions: "I came to this city to build up a mountain of envy/ To marry a Kennedy."

The band's musical ambitions are less spectacular, but their attempt to move beyond the West Coast fixation of their debut has to be applauded: the closest they come to that close-harmony sound here is the closing "The Irish Keep Gate-Crashing". Elsewhere, the blend of organ and piano makes "Found My Rosebud" sound like The Charlatans doing a Dylan impression, although other tracks are less easily distilled to such essences, thanks in part to the furtive swirls of strings. But there's nothing here with quite the appealing vivacity of "Santa Cruz".

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