a record review from the UK

“They’ve sold more than one million albums in America, and it isn’t hard to see why: the Denver band make music that would struggle to wake the horses, never mind frighten them. They are co-managed by the son of a former Sony BMG bigwig, and you might conclude that they’d have to be spectacularly bad not to go platinum with a leg-up like that. What’s truly offensive about the Fray is the complacency and lack of invention in the music: song after song rolls by, with Isaac Slade pounding his piano and emoting emptily in his Curtis Stigers whine, and each is as crease-free, as people-pleasing, as the last. These are songs for the shopping mall and the elevator; life and nature observed from an air-conditioned automobile. Sadly, they’re going to be huge.”