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Friday, August 13, 2010

Tired Pony - The Place We Ran From

Surely side-projects are designed to allow musicians to go a little leftfield without having to worry about alienating their fan-base. Don’t they offer the perfect opportunity for artists to get that pan-piped concept album out of their system before going back to their day job? Apparently not if you’re Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody. Having assembled some impressive names - including Peter Buck, Richard Colburn from Belle & Sebastian, Editors’ Tom Smith, Iain Archer, M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel - for his new country-rock band, it is equally amazing and disappointing that the result often sounds just like Snow Patrol.

On the plus side, Tired Pony certainly doesn’t have any of the self-congratulatory smugness that sometimes comes with side-projects. In fact, the album has a rather disarming feeling of humility. The downside is that it’s often a little dull. While there are some nice moments - Deschanel duets prettily with Lightbody on Get On The Road, Iain Archer, as always, is charming and Tom Smith stands out for his haunting delivery on album highlight, the acoustic The Good Book - for the most part, the lack of risks taken on The Place We Ran From is hugely frustrating. It may lean slightly further towards Americana than arms-in-the-air British indie, but it is still pretty much the same congenial middle of the road stuff that Gary Lightbody has been writing for years. While this album is certainly better than the majority of Snow Patrol’s output, it would have been so much more interesting had Lightbody strayed a few steps further from his comfort zone. A wasted opportunity.

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