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The Fray - The Fray
| Billboard |
| As the Fray's sophomore album winds to a close, frontman Isaac Slade announces that "all is not well" —which lets you know the mood of these 10 tracks is not exactly cheerful. "The Fray" is a more angst-filled and melancholy set than you'd expect from a group following up a double-platinum debut, populated with songs about lost love and tortured souls. But hand-wringing music sells, especially when it also hews close to the melodic, piano-driven pop of 2005's "How to Save a Life." Choruses swell on "Syndicate" and "You Found Me," the album's first single. The airily upbeat "Where the Story Ends" nods to Coldplay, and a trio of songs—the gentle "Ungodly Hour," the fuzzy-grooved "We Build Then We Break" and the subtly building "Happiness" —bring the album to a powerful and emotionally rich close. On the last song, Slade sings, "Happiness damn near destroys you"—but it's certainly in no danger of ruining the Fray. —Gary Graff...full text |
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| Allmusci |
| The Fray's sophomore release picks up where How to Save a Life left off, reprising the same blend of piano-led ballads and midtempo pop/rock that helped establish the band in 2005. International tours and platinum-selling singles may have turned the Fray into a superstar act, but the actual songcraft remains virtually unchanged, with songs like "You Found Me" and "Enough for Now" sounding eerily similar to their predecessors. Those parallels are strengthened by producers Aaron Johnson and Mike Flynn, both of whom helmed How to Save a Life and repeat the job here to predictable effect. What's different, then, is the occasional "widening" of the Fray's sound; the rock numbers are slightly louder (culminating in a percussive, distorted breakdown during "We Build Then We Break") and the ballads somewhat softer, with "Ungodly Hour" standing out as the sparsest of the bunch. The band seems uncomfortable with either extreme, however, either overshooting the rockers or reducing the ballads to little more than Isaac Slade's zealous vocals, which are often so garbled with angsty passion that they might as well be caricaturing the American accent. Like the rest of his bandmates, Slade is most comfortable in the middle, where the Fray comfortably churns out the album's best numbers: the melancholy, minor-keyed "Absolute"; "Syndicate" (whose guitar riff in 6/4 time is perhaps the disc's quirkiest moment); and "You Found Me." It's testament to the band's appeal that "You Found Me" became a Top 10 single before The Fray was even released, but that likely speaks to its familiarity -- this is, after all, the equivalent of How to Save a Life, Pt. 2 -- rather than any purported originality....full text |
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| Blender |
| The Fray may just be the most faceless band ever to sell 3 million records, and therein lies their brilliance. The Denver foursome is spectacularly anonymous: poignant enough to bring out the waterworks, but generic enough not to get in the way of someone else’s story—making them the perfect soundtrack for prime-time melodrama. Frontman Isaac Slade’s pleasantly raspy croon and teardrops-on-my-piano wistfulness helped land 2005’s “How to Save a Life” everywhere, from Grey’s Anatomy to One Tree Hill, but without the help of a plot line or scrubs-clad eye candy, these songs tend to wash together into one fierce tidal wave of meh. Their first hit single, “Over My Head (Cable Car),” was the catchiest song about public transportation since Sheena Easton’s “Morning Train (Nine to Five).” Here, only “You Found Me,” an aching ballad about being forsaken by God, stands out. It sounded even better on the commercial for Lost....full text |
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