Morning Runner - Burning Benches
If you went travelling the country and burnt every book with 'Teach Yourself Piano/Keyboards' in the title, the world would be a much better place. No longer would disillusioned wannabe indie rockstars write monotonous repetitive piano riffs attempting to rip off Coldplay. You can get away with teaching yourself guitar, it's not that hard, but to learn to play piano you need feeling, grace and above all musicality. Chris Martin may have been able to get away with it once or twice but at least he went and learnt a few arpeggios, the riff underpinning this single from Morning Runner is almost as bad as a Daniel Powter offering. Yes, we get it, it's a chord, repeated, and repeated. What's that? Something new in the middle eight? Oh no... there it is again.
Burning Benches isn't a bad song really, it's just not a great song either. It's as if the band's front man Mathew Greener read 'How to write an indie single in ten steps' got up to step 7 and then got bored. The song has most of the things you'd expect: a dull yet meaningful chordal riff, a slow build to a half sung-half shouted chorus, and some heartfelt yet slightly obscure lyrics. Sadly there's just nothing interesting here, the only thing that gets you to the end of the song is some clever production and a surprising fact, despite the current trends Mathew actually has a fairly decent voice. You won't remember this single unless something particularly momentous was happening when you heard it, so just buy something by Arcade Fire or Ben Folds instead.