Some bands consolidate upon their successes [1] and build even further, while others find a great deal of anxiety and frustration in success, not finding that it meets their hopes and dreams. Keane is one of the second kind of bands, whose sophomore album, rather than reflecting success and encouragement. The album was successful, going to #1 in the United Kingdom and selling more than three million copies worldwide, but it was about half of the first album’s sales, and the album was full of dissatisfaction in the friendship between the band’s lead songwriter and the band’s lead singer [2], a dynamic that would continue throughout the band’s body of work as a whole. Not only is this album rather melancholy about romantic love, but even friendship is threatened by success and by personal demons. Now, for a track-by-track review:

Atlantic – This particular song is a gloomy and ethereal reflection on fear and aging and loneliness and the desire of a loved one to help life be more pleasant. One of the most touching aspects of this song, for me, is the way the song ends on an unresolved chord, reflecting the unresolved nature of the narrator’s longing.

Is It Any Wonder? – This song, a relatively successful single off of the album, features a distorted piano, and gloomily reflects upon exhaustion and frustration. The song has architectural referents, as well as commenting that love in our times and situations is something known only from children’s rhymes, which seems all too true.

Nothing In My Way – This is a song about divided lovers, reflecting on divorce or breaking up, problems setting and respecting boundaries, and putting on a false front of cheer to hide feeling dismal and despondent. The song’s title is deeply ironic, reflecting the deception of appearing to be happy when one is deeply troubled.

Leaving So Soon? – This sad song, which is reflecting on a troubled friendship or relationship of some kind, comments on the sad fate of someone opening up about themselves, and seeing to one’s sadness that others find it too much to take, and quickly leave. The comparison of a friendship or relationship with plants is notable here.

A Bad Dream – This dark and melancholy song was a moderately successful single in the United Kingdom especially, and it reflects on death, the loss of friendships, and the feeling that someone has become the sort of person one was born to hate. It is the sensation of waking up from tormented sleep only to realize that one’s day-to-day existence is a torment as well.

Hamburg Song – This song, which is an organ ballad, is a reflection on a desire for friendship and the feeling that one’s generosity is taken advantage of because one is diffident and relatively undemanding. It is a song full of longing and suffering, and is a beautiful song despite its deep mood of sadness.

Put It Behind You – This song, is yet another breakup sort of song, where the narrator seems to parody the sort of lame self-help clichés that tend to be used to cheer people up in such a situation. The song urges people to do what is best for them, but that is precisely the sort of problem many of us face in life, not being able to do that or sometimes even to know what is best for us.

The Iron Sea – This is the sort of song that a band puts in an album as Grammy bait in order to attempt to snag a nomination for best rock instrumental. This song, coming in at almost 3:30, would have been worthy of such a nomination, as its spooky and menacing feeling compliments the album well.

Crystal Ball – This song is an up-tempo but downbeat song about the search for something to tell us who we are, when all we see is our despondent and catatonic state, no matter whether we try to fall on the earth or call upon God in heaven. The song appears to be about feeling lost and seeking salvation, not only in an ultimate sense, but in the sense of present overwhelming troubles.

Try Again – This song, like “Put It Behind You,” is an attempt to move forward and recover what was lost in a troubled relationship. It speaks of dysfunctional fighting, about being so exhausted that one falls asleep on the train, and about not wanting to see people who bring us suffering but feeling compelled to try again anyway.

Broken Toy – This is a song that, like “Is It Any Wonder?” appears to reflect on childhood, as the narrator feelings like a broken toy. It is a sad and spare ballad, and seems to hint at a darker undertone to the gloominess of the album as a whole.

The Frog Prince – Yet another song that uses a childlike and dreamlike image to reflect a reality, this is a song about the isolation and ruin that result from putting on an image of coolness and having the hollow reality become evident to others. The song reflects a longing for innocence, for transparency, and for a lack of faith that such qualities are to be found to a great degree in our contemporary society.

Unlike the attempt to balance out hopes and fears in their previous album, here Keane seems to succumb to despair in their sophomore album. Over and over again the songs reflect loneliness, isolation, torment, and the breakup of relationships, and the fear of reality. The songs point back to a time of lost innocence that seems forever beyond recovery, and the façade that is placed to cover one’s insecurities and vulnerabilities appears like an iron sea that imprisons the tender heart beneath. If one wished to dig even deeper into the album, this song seems to reflect a far deeper trauma than the usual suffering of broken relationships and fickle friends, but suggests a far more disturbing root of the complicated tangle of problems that lie beneath this album’s melancholy material. The fact that this album was my favorite album of 2006, the year my father died, and that it still to this day reflects my own mood and concerns and issues is something I find rather disconcerting, but so it is.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/album-review-hopes-fears/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Iron_Sea