Album Review: Cause and Effect by Keane

Making a welcome comeback after a lengthy seven-year hiatus, English quartet Keane returned with their fifth full-length effort, Cause and Effect. Steeped in the heartbreak and complications that arise from a devastating breakup, the album followed a particularly tumultuous period in the band's history, during which time frontman Tom Chaplin battled addiction and kicked off a successful solo career, while main songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley faced his own demons and saw his marriage dissolve. As such, Cause and Effect forms a loose emotional trilogy with their breakthrough debut, Hopes and Fears, and its dark follow-up, Under the Iron Sea, only this time matured by an appropriately adult point of view.

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The Radio 2-friendly band's first album in seven years is a cosy reminder that they have had four consecutive UK Number One records, but there's experimentation too Keane are probably the most unlikely nostalgia act to re-emerge for a new millennial audience over the last few years. Just watch their set from this year's Glastonbury, or keep and eye on any late night house party shuffle through Spotify, and you'll see 20-somethings remembering that the band's 2004 debut album 'Hopes & Fears', the one their mums played to death in their cars, actually really holds up. It’s a good time, then, for the band to re-emerge with 'Cause and Effect', their first new studio album in seven years.

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K eane will for ever be synonymous with their 2004 smash Somewhere Only We Know, an almost unbearably twee rush of bucolic sentimentality that earned them a reputation as the milquetoast Coldplay. Yet as the East Sussex foursome return with their first album in seven years, it's clear that they are no longer the paragons of nicey-niceness they once seemed. Cause and Effect sees the band complete the transition from innocence to experience, producing a collection of mid-life crisis tales that leave rather a bitter taste.

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