• Feb

  9

  Review: The Fray, Scars & Stories

  Filed under: album review, Listening to ..., Music, Reviews; Tagged as: album review, The Fray Scars and Stories review
  

  The Fray came on NBC’s Super Bowl pregame show Sunday afternoon performing the leadoff track from the band’s new album, Scars & Stories.

  

  Listening to Heartbeat, I caught myself thinking, “That’s OK, but it’s no How to Save a Life.”

  That thought has sort of recurred nearly a dozen times listening to the band’s new album, which was released Tuesday.

  The Fray is sort of like the kid that gets straight A’s in fourth grade. The bar has been set pretty high and even an honor roll report card doesn’t quite seem to cut it. The Fray aced its first hit single, a song about attempting to pull a troubled teen back from suicide that became a cultural marker in 2006 and ’07. The band followed with a self-titled album in 2009 that included another great song, You Found Me, once again succeeding on a penchant for vivid descriptions of cloaked, aching emotion.

  Songs like these succeed by not seeming to try. How to Save starts out as a passive intervention that grows desperate. You Found Me presents a God who says, “Ask anything” and gets an earful.

  Much of Scars & Stories unfortunately comes across as being as obvious as the title and trying really hard to emulate its predecessors like on the second track, The Fighter, an overwrought boxing story.

  I Can Barely Say comes as close as anything to recapturing the magic of The Fray’s previous hits, and the finale, Be Still, is the most satisfying track. That tune should be embraced by the band’s legion of Christian followers as a representation of a God to embrace many of the troubled souls in other Fray tunes.

  Every band has its style and profile. But The Fray feels a bit too much like it is trying to put itself into a box defined by its first taste of success, and it’s becoming a trap that does not allow for growth.

  
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