Review Summary: An outing only for the most diehard of The Fray followers.
The Fray were never a particularly inventive band, but I was always able to gather something of value from their music:
How to Save a Life had some pretty emotive tunes,
The Fray offered their most polished songwriting, and
Scars & Stories /
Helios each had undeniably infectious melodies. At the foundation of it all was always frontman and lead vocalist Isaac Slade, whose passion could be felt at the turn of every admittedly pedestrian pop-rock verse. In the absence of complexity, there was always at least affectionate delivery and execution.
With the departure of Isaac Slade in 2022, The Fray now seem even more ordinary. Joe King, the band’s former backing vocalist/rhythm guitarist and founding member, fills in somewhat admirably on the band’s fifth full-length LP,
A Light That Waits. He’s a good enough singer – if anything, his voice is even smoother and cleaner. However, it lacks the emotional cracks and inflections that made Slade’s delivery feel authentic. King’s lines glide by like a poppier Goo Goo Dolls minus any of the grunge influence, and the result is an album that is competently written but otherwise feels lifeless.
The blame doesn’t fall solely on King’s shoulders – in fact, the entire band does very little to offset Slade’s departure. There are no wrinkles to The Fray’s long-established formula (if anything, the songwriting here is even
safer), and they do nothing to replace the loss of Slade’s elegant piano contributions. With entire dimensions of the band’s signature sound missing, a new game plan was in order – instead, we got the same old formula rolled out once more, only without any of the elements that appealed to listeners in the first place.
The good news here is that the band can still craft decent hooks.
A Light That Waits leans into that strength fairly consistently – particularly on the uplifting title track – and generally delivers agreeable melodies from front to end. The Fray are likely well into the “legacy act” portion of their career by now, and despite this album’s many shortcomings, they still manage to create something here that will ever-so-approximately scratch the itch of The Fray’s classic vibe – even if it feels significantly eroded by the combination of Isaac’s absence and the band’s inability to explore alternate sonic avenues.
A Light That Waits is an outing only for the most diehard of The Fray followers. It’s an even plainer version of what they once were, which is actually an impressively low bar to have to crawl under, and whatever emotional element once existed in their music has been vanquished. All that’s really left is a batch of decent-enough contemporary radio-pop melodies. Perhaps foolishly, I still haven’t lost all hope for this band – but they will need to do something other than march slowly and willingly into obsolescence.
