Album Review: 'The Secret to Life' by FIZZ

Rating: 2/5

FIZZ’s debut album is either enormous fun or unbearably irritating depending on your attitude towards fancy dress. Each new single cover has presented a new array of wacky, technicolour outfits, the bandmates positioned in ludicrous funfair-themed situations as a result of what can only be described as an outrageous misuse of someone’s Photoshop skills. Their music is similarly garish: brash blasts of rock guitars, group vocals delivered in tantrum-like yelps and more than one stoop to singing “dah dah dah”s apparently when lyrics were deemed too much effort. It should come as no surprise at this point that I don’t like fancy dress.

Clearly very close friends, The Secret to Life often suffers from FIZZ’s over-enthusiasm: Strawberry Jam, for instance, is promising until the group ram a hopelessly dull hook about picnicking with friends into the ground with a interminable crescendo, turning the whole thing into a dirge. Lead single High in Brighton is similarly repetitive and one-dimensional.

It’s not all bad, though. Album highlight I Just Died is genuinely fun to listen to and its cheeky chorus hook lives long in the memory. Orla Gartland-led Close One is lyrically (if not musically) interesting, and As Good As It Gets is perhaps the only time all FIZZ’s overzealous shouting gets a worthy rock instrumental to match. Lights Out follows, which boasts a strong chorus that could have taken flight had the band not restricted themselves to an a capella rendition.

Where The Secret to Life struggles is in the tricky task of cutting through emotionally with not one singer and lyricist, but four. In the end, it can only offer an uninspiring middle ground that occasionally reverts to cliché. It’s most obvious on the painstakingly spelled-out closing track The Grand Finale (“the curtains fall / the credits roll”), a stab at a Bohemian Rhapsody-esque farewell that ends up a misjudged and superficial mess. It sums up an album where this band largely let their overexcitement get the better of them. FIZZ are clearly having fun, but I can’t help but feel a bit left out of the party.