Braking Out

Turin Brakes are nice guys. You know the type--sensitive chaps. There will always be a place for the nice guys in music, if only because they're so damned earnest. Bless them--they have so much tenderness, so much love to pine about cryptically.

Olly Knights and Gale Paridjian have charmed themselves into the adoring coos of the British music press, picking up a Mercury Prize (UK Grammy) and being heralded as the start of a transition toward a folkier, acoustic trend. Predictable Brit-press hype notwithstanding, Turin Brakes' debut LP The Optimist is charming and affable in the best nice-boy-with-guitar fashion, a refreshing breeze of beautifully wrought luminous sunsets and starry nights.

"I panic at the quiet times/ decisions at the door," sighs their single "The Door," somewhat contradicting the core of their sound, which is best at its quietest and most thoughtful. Their soft melodies, most winning on the album's blissfully sunny opener "Feeling Oblivion," are hesitant and expectant but yield to a calm reflection. They channel the spirits of Nick Drake and Woody Guthrie (the woozy, fading tenderness of "By TV Light") and sing of rusted rainbows and hazy hills. They ache to please, and you can almost imagine the groups of girls gazing tearily up at them as they sit on their coffee-shop stools.

The more active parts of the album find them turning to more predictable sources, although very competently so: "Underdog" is as good a U2 song as anything on that group's last album, Jeff Buckley shines in"Mind over Money" and "Slack" sounds like, well, any other British band.

However, after a while, nice, sensitive guys start to bore you. See, their whole deal is that they haven't quite grown up yet (which explains the unrestrained juvenile impulses that ruin a song like "Future Boy" with lines like "Syphillis is a bitch/ but contracting HIV is much worse" or "My friends are all junkies/ but they're still my friends/ as long as they don't use monkeys"). All that pining grows a little stale, and you kinda wish they'd find some other coffee shop to play in, or maybe learn a little something more about life than dreams of island paradises or whatever. Nice chaps, though.

--By Greg Bloom