The Silencers
Seconds Of Pleasure

Two things to start. Listen to "I Can Feel It"... Focus on Jimme O’Neill's voice in the opening verses... Don't you think it's time to drop Coldplay a couple of (further) positions in your personal ranking of British bands? And still in this song, isn't it true that the chorus resembles the famous dance-song more or less contemporary (this album is from 1993) titled "Your Lovin' Arms"? Who's copying whom?

Then listen to "The Unhappiest Man": here the blueprint can't help but be O'Neill, as everything in this track echoes R.E.M.'s "The One I Love".

Apart from these two things, O'Neill and Cha Burns' Silencers, on their fourth album, have decided to change, albeit slightly. Firstly, their taste for Celtic epic has mellowed down quite a bit. If "Cellar Of Dreams" holds up compared to the past and "Unconscious" is the "usual" acoustic, voice, and bagpipes ending, "Walkmans And Magnums" is nothing less than a cross between Celtic rock and a '60s Californian jukebox track!

Bending "roots" and smoothing the most pronounced influences for easier listening and greater adherence to the times. Without distorting anything, the task succeeds even when the two transform their new wave into beautiful melodic rock, as happens in the excellent ballad "My Prayer", the evocative "Life Can Be Fatal", or again in "It's Only Love", rock married to traditional.

O'Neill insists a little more with the blues, whose voice has become a bit huskier (at times, especially at peaks, it resembles our own Raf) and therefore more suitable for certain atmospheres. The blond guy demonstrates once again that he may have his nice ideas in the blues, but he cannot hope to take off there.

Lastly, folk: it marries electricity in the aforementioned "It's Only Love" and with a French accordion, in the evocative "menestrellata" "Streetwalker Song".

Almost everything changes, melts, flakes, binds to something else to become easier, more catchy, more assimilable, more digestible... "Seconds Of Pleasure" isn't the best Silencers' album, but it's undoubtedly the easiest. Of excellent level, but superb if what you’re looking for is just what it indicates: moments of pure pleasure. And nothing else.