ALBUM: Feeder - Silent Cry

Let's be honest here, ever since their landmark album Echo Park, Feeder have become more and more of a guilty pleasure. It's not that they are particularly bad - not at all - their brand of post-grunge anthemic arena-pop-rock remains as infectious as ever, it just that they have never really broken a huge amount of new ground in front of their competitors, but then again, no one ever asked them too.

If nothing else, this album demonstrates how Feeder are the strawberry jam of the British music world. It can pretty much be put on anything within reason, be it on toast, porridge or the line-up of Download Festival. Some may prefer blueberry jam or marmite, but no one can really say they don't like strawberry jam. Strawberry Jam is also simple, sweet and one third japanese.

But before I over-stretch an already straining metaphor, Feeder's latest album, and their first full album of new material since their Singles album and re-issued B-Sides compilation Picture Of Perfect Youth, has all the hallmarks of what has come before. The anthemic lyrics, the less-than-subtle loud-chorus, quiet-verse formula that they have used in almost every song, and the general feeling that these tracks were made to be blasted out into an arena-sized auditorium full of teenagers.

Opening track "We Are People" starts out like Weezer before Nichols and a frankly epically-proportioned drumbeat drive the track on. "Itsumo" follows a similar formula, but with an intro more in tune to Coldplay's "Fix You". "Fires" is unashamed pop with its ballady yet driving intro and verse, countered with the somewhat inevitable guitar crescendoes for the chorus. "Heads Held High" is an acoustic number that would not have been out of place on Pushing The Senses.

For a while in the development of this album, there was rumoured to be a return to the old Feeder sound that many fans had been asking for, and this is present in a couple of cases, but the tongue-in-cheek joviality of Feeder's early albums Swim and Polythene is gone in favour of the "emotionally availiable" sound of their most recent albums. At the time of their last album, the band were roundly criticised for apparently being influenced by both the fashionable misery-mongers of early 00s bands such as Coldplay and Travis, as well as trying to satisfy the softer end of the emo-market.

However, throughout Silent Cry, it is difficult not to notice how much of a mark that the somewhat softer Pushing The Senses has made, and while it's unlikely for Feeder to be placed in the same sentence as pop-emoers 30 Seconds to Mars, it would not be a massive leap of imagination to link the two, insulting as that is to Feeder.

Rather ironically, even though the album resembles the poppier edge of their countrymen Lostprophets, it contains fewer hooks than any of their previous singles, despite what greatest hits single "Lost & Found" appeared to be alluding to, instead favouring power over precision, blasting every song to within the very inch of their lives. Basically - it all sounds a bit samey, but still good enough to put on your toast.

6/10

Silent Cry is out now in the UK on Echo records.