Attic Lights - Friday Night Lights

is Attic Lights debut album, and sadly aside from one or two highlights it’s decidedly average. The majority of the record is generic Beach Boys influenced pop, with keyboards, chiming guitars and sunny vocal harmonies.

Most of the songs on here would be suitable radio filler if there were to be some shortage of piano pop at this time (however with Keane, Coldplay and Snow Patrol all active this year it doesn’t seem likely) but that’s not really saying an awful lot for it. It’s not irredeemable but if the listener got a pound for every time a “woooh”, “oooohhh”, “aaaah” or “ba-da-ba” was used …

Anyway, it’s not all bad. Recent single ‘Bring You Down’ is fantastic, with a chorus of “I can’t tell you, ‘cause I don’t wanna bring you down”, it’s bouncy and brings a smile to the face in spite of the lyrics. Don’t let this fool you into thinking that it represents the album though, for much of the rest is a plodding version of this. The nearest that they get to this again is on ‘Last Night Sunshine’,

The biggest surprise on ‘Friday Night Lights’ is when singer Kevin Sherry’s voice on ‘Send Those Dark Eyes This Way’ morphs to sound like his native Scottish, until the point where they mention Glasgow you could swear that they were American. Elsewhere on the album ‘God’ isn’t bad , if somewhat bizarrely titled and ‘Nothing But Love’ sounds interesting, bringing in electric sounding Hawaiian guitars and bouncy Britpop piano. If they weren’t hidden under the vocal harmonies then Attic Lights may have made another album highlight. However, in trying to fuse the British and American sounds they’ve come across as Americans stealing little snippets of Britain, which is surely a shame as the ideas are rather nice.

‘Winter On’ is a slow burner, with distant, atmospheric percussion helping to build up a sound that actually sounds like winter mornings frost on fields, with piano’s taking the fore. This song will be everywhere come Christmas time and rightly so. As an album closer it’s damn near perfect for this type of music, however you get the feeling that had Attic Lights tested out bits of this sound or formula a bit earlier on too then they might have come up with a more worthwhile, or at least more varied album. Still, you can understand wanting to bring some Beach Boys sun to Scotland, can’t you.