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I Keep Forgetting Just How Great This Song Is. I Keep Forgetting...

Puka Shell Media's Best New Music 2006

The Fray

How To Save a Life

[SonyBMG; 2005]

Rating: 8.4 Puka Shells

For a few years now, The Fray’s stagey, hyperliterate acoustic-rock has played well at indie labels Virgin and SonyBMG. The quartet has occupied a small community-theater space with gleefulness and confidence, but now it's accepted a scholarship to Epic Records, which means a larger stage and a bigger audience. Can the band still project, or will its voices be lost in a cavernous auditorium, rejoined only by crickets and barely stifled coughs of boredom? Will nine-minute waning relationship epics play in Peoria?
Given the band's graduation from minor to major leagues, How To Save a Life may prove to be the most crucial record The Fray will release in their lifetime. Fortunately, their fourth album further magnifies and refines their strengths. Winsomely balancing frivolity and gravity, The Fray assembles an oddball menagerie of the usual rogues and rascals, soldiers and criminals, lovers and baby butchers-- but they've got a lot more tricks up their sleeves than previous albums had hinted. How To Save a Life employs an impressive variety of styles and sounds to tell Slade's imaginative stories: There's the band's usual acoustic-rock, honed to an incisively sharp point, but they also deploy a smuggler's blues ("She Is"), a creepy lullaby ("Over My Head (Cable Car)"), a Led Zep stomp ("How To Save a Life"), and, perhaps most divisively, a multipart prog track ("All At Once") that stretches well past the 10-minute mark. No epic chantey this time, though.
Slade's inventive songwriting is the binding force, emphasizing character but remaining ever in thrall to stories, savoring the way they always play out to the same conclusions. Along with the homosexual undertones that have informed The Fray’s songs from every album, he jettisons most of the archetypes that inspired Reason (EP) and cuts his characters loose in their own tales. They still do what they're fated to do-- the thieves thieve and run amok, the lovers love and die tragically, the soldiers soldier on and pine for peaceful homes-- but they seem to do it more out of free will than authorial design.
Slade focuses mainly on matters of war ("Fall Away") and love ("Heaven Forbid"). On the duet "Look After You", Slade plays the part of an errant, possibly dead Civil War soldier while singer-songwriter Rob Thomas cameos as his "sweetheart left behind." It's Cold Mountain writ poignantly small, its sweet, wordless chorus perfectly life-size. Lumbering menacingly, the martial march of "Look After You" smells of gunpowder and singed hair, although it sounds like it's anchored in Neverland despite trying to comment on real-world events.
Slade's taletelling will always define the The Fray, but How To Save a Life puts as much weight on the music as on the lyrics, and here the band gels into a tight, intuitive unit. The musicians give each song a particular spark and character, not just reinforcing the lyrics but actively telling a story. They create a breezy eddy of guitar strums and piano chords to enhance a windborne melody and an undercurrent of peril on "Hundred", and the tragedy of "Vienna"-- any good song about star-crossed lovers must end in death-- is countered by the pep of the music, especially Dave Welsh’s ascending and descending guitar, which seems to take a particular glee in the inevitable denouement. The band isn't just able-bodied, but ambitious to boot. It makes the brainy prog of that monster second track, a distillation of the musical reach of their 2003 EP Reason, sound like a natural extension of their base sound. They troll confidently from the rumbling overture and heated exposition of "Dead Wrong" to the final rueful notes of "Little House". The song is chockablock with progisms-- organ runs, dampered cymbals, laser piano-- but manages to shake off the genre quote marks as the band jam with convincing menace.
Their range allows them to be precociously diverse, but everything fits naturally. How To Save a Life sounds like their most shapely album to date, resembling a spirited story arc in its set-up, rising action, climax, and resolution. In this structure the three title segments, despite essentially bookending the tracklist, form the album's thematic centerpiece, the music and story meshing gracefully and tenderly to retell a Japanese fable. " Over My Head (Cable Car)" opens the album with a ruminative flourish as Ben Wysocki’s drums push the sensuous thrust of the music and Slade's delivery of the lines "I never knew, I never knew that everything was falling through" colors the resignation of "eight seconds in overtime, she’s on your mind, she’s on your mind." It opens the album en medias res, setting up the subsequent story-songs as the narrator's rueful reminiscences.
" How To Save a Life" comprises a medley towards the album's end, starting slow and soft but gradually reaching crescendo in an unfurling finale, with Slade breaking the word "life" into multiple syllables over an unraveling drum beat. Restrained yet resonant, the song's (and album's) climax is a remarkable moment. As it segues into the rousing coda of "Fall Away", The Fray sound like a band that knows exactly where they're going and won't be satisfied until you come along for the trip.

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Coming Winter 2008

Have You Been Up My Wishing Tree?

The Good The Bad and the Ugly

0.4 pukashells for Sergio Leone's masterpiece.