The Script - Science & Faith on CD

Description

Follow-up to The Script's debut album from Dubliners Danny O’Donoghue, Mark Sheehan and Glen Power. "For The First Time" is the lead track and is the inspirational key to The Script’s second album Science & Faith - an addictive blend of hip hop rhythms, flowing melodies, sparkling hooks and poignant, story-spinning lyrics, with Danny’s mellifluous soulful vocals riding high over huge, anthemic choruses. Finding weighty, emotion-packed mini-epics came thick and fast, Science & Faith is far from a difficult second album. Review The chorus to a pop song can be a wonderful thing. No matter how unsettling or scratchy the verse, no matter how atonal and challenging the bridge, everything comes right in the joyous rush of a decent chorus. The chorus is where storm-clouds are parted, waves calm, and sunshine lights up the darkest corners of the human soul as abruptly as fluorescent strip-lights in a scary cellar. The Script have just such a chorus, and they know it: so much so that it has been crammed, with minor trims and fiddles, into almost every song on their second album. It’s their secret weapon, a chugging, stately thing which is designed to be equally at home in a stadium sing-along or as the soundtrack to an emotional montage in a TV drama. What they do is set up a four (or sometimes three) chord trick, where the piano and bass play an urgent four-beats-to-the-bar and Danny O'Donoghue urgently crams a ton of words into a short melodic fragment, which he repeats a lot. He gets to rant and hoot, and they get to strike a few epic rock poses. Everyone’s a winner. You can tell he loves his hip hop as much as his Keane and U2 – although let’s not get carried away, it’s Keane that win, by a mile – and his sandpaper croon carries a lot of emotional force, particularly on lovelorn snuggles like For the First Time and Nothing. The downside of relying on this one good idea quite so much – apart from the rising suspicion that you’re stuck in a musical mirror-maze – is that songs which are not blessed with The Chorus seem to be half-finished. Walk Away, for example, is a moodier beast than everything else on offer, being closer to Eminem’s self-piteous darkness than Coldplay’s sunny optimism. But after a heap of consecutive Big Chorus songs, it’s hard to escape the feeling that something has been mislaid. Luckily, it’s not a problem anyone has to put up with for very long. 

Tracks

Disc 1:
1 - You Won't Feel a Thing,
2 - For the First Time,
3 - Nothing,
4 - Science & Faith,
5 - If You Ever Come Back,
6 - Long Gone and Moved On,
7 - Deadman Walking,
8 - This Is Love,
9 - Walk Away,
10 - Exit Wounds