British invasion

Keane leads a pack of notable new releases | David Sessions

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Keane emerged from East Sussex in 2004 as a guitar-free Coldplay competitor. Coldplay lead Chris Martin once asked Tim Rice-Oxley, Keane's pianist, to join Coldplay.

The trio went its own way, following Rice-Oxley's razor-sharp piano melodies and singer Tom Chaplin's huge voice to national stardom. But U.S. critics have always dismissed Keane as an indulgent exercise in bombastic moroseness: pretty and pleasant, but obnoxious and painfully obvious. On their third album, Perfect Symmetry (Interscope Records), the band has ditched some of its towering atmospherics for an almost zany retro-dance sound that is at once strange and completely Keane.

Lead single album opener "Spiralling" is perhaps the shiniest fleck in this kaleidoscope, a reincarnation of 1980s disco accented with a pseudo-tribal percussion track, skittish synthesizers, and plenty of soaring arcs for Tom Chaplin's vocals to travel. The similarly upbeat "Better Than This" shows off Keane melody composition at its best—so addictive that 20 consecutive plays would not be too many.