Review Summary: Playing it safe.
Safe in Sound is a sadly apt title. It indicates Lower Than Atlantis’ decision to play it safe and continue on their path towards the mainstream, which is disappointing, seeming as they used to have some semblance of personality; now they could be anyone. According to frontman Mike Duce,
Safe In Sound contains "some bangin’ LTA songs, some rock bangers”, and some stuff he’d written “with boybands in mind”. He was wrong: there are no bangers here. Furthermore, boybands excel at making unashamedly fun music: Lower than Atlantis don’t. In their attempt to mesh these disparate styles together they’ve succeeded in making an album that can’t decide what it wants to be, and subsequently fails at being anything.
For example, the first lyric on opener “Had Enough” is “I hate everyone I meet”, which could be a pretty striking first statement, were it delivered with any conviction. Instead, Duce intones it in a sickly smooth sing-along voice that conveys nothing but a desire to be accepted; he tries so hard to give off a dangerous vibe without wanting to scare anyone off. All of the more rock-orientated tracks suffer from this fault, an artificial heaviness that isn’t backed up by any actual aggression or spontaneity. The guitars are stolid, neutered machines, going through the motions in flavourless perfection, so when Duce repeats that he’s “had enough”
ad nauseam you feel the same (and that’s only by the first track).
Then there’s the more pop orientated tracks, although the extent to which any of these tracks can be firmly planted in one category is debatable. They’re all about the same amalgamation of polished production, sweet, earnest choruses and Duce’s mind-numbingly dull lyrics. “Boomerang” is by far the worst offender, a horribly faux-electronic track that is so painfully lacking in self-awareness it un-ironically contains the lyric “flogging a dead horse”. Although, “I Would” isn’t far behind, with its awfully done-to-death theme of “here is a list of things I would do for you because I love you so much” that shouldn’t persuade anyone in the slightest; Duce does heartfelt adoration just as poorly as he does misanthropy. This is the basic problem with
Safe In Sound: it tries to appeal to LTA’s now aging teenage fan-base and the mainstream at the same time, resulting in angst-y lyrics such as “I'd die alone just to walk you home” being intoned without any conviction at all, coming off more contrived and tacky than honest. In the end though I wouldn’t mind if he followed through with his claims, seeming as killing a man “just to hold your hand” might land him in jail, and then we’d be spared anymore of this bollocks.
