Hooray For Earth - Racy

Kicking off with pleasingly heavy guitar chords Racy's opening track 'Hey' doesn't then go the way you might expect, as the far lighter and clear vocals come in and the song soars to a close over a strung out guitar solo. Album number two from Hooray For Earth therefore shows a bit of diversity from 2011 release True Loves right from the start. 

Phoenix come to mind on track two, the pop grunge 'Keys' and from there it's but a short hop to the synth-backed wonder of the lushly anthemic 'Say Enough'. From these early tracks it's pretty clear that song titling is not massively important here - six of the album's overall nine are known by a single word whilst the rest don't stretch past two. Better that than "untitled" though.

Building on the success and positive reception garnered by True Loves the NY-based quartet fit pretty snuggly somewhere between the more expansive scope of Arcade Fire and that of Moby's non-blues sampling efforts - accessible, generally well paced and joyful indie rock.

Halfway through the album's length the title track shifts the mood slightly with it's moodier, shoegazing style although the choruses are right back up there in the reaches of anthem land. It's too short by half, however, and rather lets the side down because of that. 

'Last, First' maintains the downbeat nature of its predecessor and in doing so maintains the interest by evoking Joe Jackson, which is lucky as if not for that it would risk overstaying its welcome.

On the whole then this is a solid follow up to True Loves but, despite that initial diversity, will probably not engender the same desire for more that the earlier album did. Live the the songs may be experienced in a different way of course - there are enough solos and anthemic elements to make for a pretty emotionally charged performance, that just unfortunately isn't fully communicated in their recorded versions. 

Racy is released on July 29 and available from amazon and iTunes.