Lights. Action! – All Eyes To Me

• 25th Apr 2008

Squeezing a bit more mileage out of emo and ditching the worst of the histrionics, Lights.Action! might herald a something of a new dawn with their mini-album All Eyes To The Morning Sun. If the kids don’t love the superfluous punctuation, there’s plenty of youthful angst as well as suprising depth.

Story Of A Broken Boy may contain the old chestnut “forgive father for I have sinned” and whiny-dude vocals, but the rest of the crop is visceral yet spirited. Aurora is a gutsy standard and the softer Ghosts just as likeable, haunted by Killers-style keyboards. Hide And Seek, an Imogen Heap cover with a tom-tom break, is the most mature of the lot, while the brief title track and ‘outro’ sounds strangely (but appropriately, given the solar theme) like Blaze Of Glory, all foot stomping and steel guitar. But it’s Satellites that puts its fellow songs in the shade, like a teen anthem with a full wall of guitar sound and rapturous lyrics on watching the heavens.

Altogether, it makes for My Chemical Romance minus the spleen, or the epic and ethereal bits of Stellastarr*. And on the subject of unnecessary symbols, if you wondered what happened to Panic At The Disco’s exclamation mark, perhaps Lights.Action! is your answer.