Once Bitten Twice Shy

The Keys
From: Wales

After taking a month off the Devil's album of the month is back and it's another cracker. ‘Bitten By Wolves’, the new album from (obligatory cliché warning) Welsh wizards The Keys, finds the band at a crossroads, not quite sure whether to shake off their earlier incarnation as John Peel favourites Murry the Hump and embrace a tighter, more mature, more mainstream sound. It’s an album that finds them feeling their way, trying out various styles to see which one fits them best, an album that wears it’s eclecticism on its sleeve.

On the upbeat, and really rather brilliant, I Tried To Find It In Books and the more laid back, cooler but equally brilliant The Color Red you can hear echoes of their former band. They’re both packed to the gills with the effortless cool of the early Dandy Warhols. But then, without warning, they go all trad rock on us unleashing their inner Rolling Stones with Everyone Loves You, a dressed down, denim clad dirty rocker before slipping in Transformation, one and half minutes of ambient electro that wouldn’t sound out of place as an OMD b-side. As they used to say on the 1970s soap opera parody Soap, ‘Confused? You soon Will Be’.

You certainly can’t accuse The Keys of adopting a formulaic approach to their craft. These are no fly by night bandwagon jumpers looking to make a quick buck by hitching themselves to any old passing trend. Not content with serving up the trad rock and reverb soaked vocals of Crackin Up (not to be confused with the Murry the Hunp track of the same name) and the drifting, AOR of title track Bitten By Wolves their eclectic menu includes When You’re Young, an echo from the summer of love. It conjures up images of lithesome barefoot hippies with flowers in their hair making shapes in fields of poppies. Then Heads of the Valleys comes galloping in with a refreshing dose of understated, almost pastoral, psychedelia. The album closes with the acoustic I Just Can’t Convince Myself, a ballad that sounds like a refugee Paul McCartney smuggled from the White album. A pleasant, yet curiously inconsequential, end to an album where the sum of the parts is better than the whole.

Bitten By Wolves is a promising, and occasionally brilliant, album that falls a little short of classic as a result of their schizophrenic genre hopping.

7/10

This article was originally written by the Devil for The 405 and is published with permission.

Go Try

The Keys - I Try To Find It In Books by 9PR

The Keys - Cracking Up by 9PR

The Keys - Myspace : Website : Last.FM

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The Keys Fire Inside



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