You Me at Six have always been a big guilty pleasure for me. ‘Take Off Your Colours’ was a great breakthrough album, and over the past few years the band themselves haven’t been shy in penning some big tunes. ‘Underdog’, ‘The Consequence’, ‘Bite My Tongue’ and ‘Reckless’, to name just a few, are fucking huge. They’re songs that’ll be gracing alternative club nights up and down the country for years to come – and rightly so.
This week sees the band release their long awaited new album, ‘Cavalier Youth’. It was previewed towards the tail end of last year with the promising lead single, ‘Lived A Lie’ and garnered the hype needed for the release of the album. The song has a super-sized chorus and that bridge will be shouted back at the band during their inevitable 2015 arena tour. ‘Cavalier Youth’ itself kicks off with ‘Too Young To Feel This Old’, which is oddly pretty much exactly the same song in terms of general song structure. The song has a super-sized chorus and that bridge will be shouted back at the band during their inevitable 2015 aren- you get it. Everything you need for a good song is here and Josh Francheschi’s vocals are a major highlight, but somehow it all falls a little flat in the end and almost becomes a parody of itself during the aforementioned bridge. It’s a little like the band threw a book of lyric clichés onto the floor and decided to just go with whatever page it landed open on.
The direction in which You Me at Six are trying to head in with ‘Cavalier Youth’ is as clear as day throughout the 45 minute long effort. This is supposed to be the album that propels them to arena tour mainstays, the album that finally pushes them into the territory they’ve been threatening to push into properly for years now, but for every faced paced anthem that’s led by a technically great drum beat like ‘Fresh Start Fever’, there’s a ‘Forgive and Forget’ aiming for arena rock but ending up with a limp chorus and incredibly unenthusiastic ‘whey ohs’.
You’d be forgiven for double checking whether you have the repeat button on now and again too, because ‘Room To Breathe’ has a near identical intro to ‘Forgive and Forget’. Though it contains a bit more of a meatier chorus, it just lacks that sense of urgency You Me at Six usually have nailed down and plods along with an occasional lift to accompany the chorus.
Things do pick up towards the end with ‘Be Who You Are’, which works quite well as one of the band’s more experimental efforts, and ‘Carpe Diem’ provides the pace and urgency that’s otherwise lacking throughout the album. The main problem with ‘Cavalier Youth’ is that the band only seem to give a shit about it for about a third of the songs at most, and because of it, the album’s verging on bland throughout. You Me at Six are a band that are so much better than the majority of anything they’ve written for ‘Cavalier Youth’, and that’s why the record is such a disappointment. It’s a watered down version of what You Me at Six are usually so good at. I have no doubt this band will be playing arenas again at some point over the next 18 months – their back catalogue more than warrants it – but it’s just a shame they’ll be promoting a weaker album in the process.
CHRIS MARSHMAN