The Script

Upfront, I'd say this is one of the best albums released by The Script. The self-titled album was their first. Their raw sound in this album is definitely a plus point. Featuring songs like 'The Man Who Can't Be Moved,' and 'We Cry,' it is undoubtedly one of the best soft rock albums I would recommend. The former single mentioned is soul-infused modern rock while the latter describes hard luck stories. The unconventional nature of their songs brings in an element of freshness. Not everything is about a girl, though some songs are. 'Rusty Halo,' for example, is The Script's first attempt at a religious song, and describes the fear of judgement day, having to 'shine (a) rusty halo'. The diverse meanings the songs suggest is one of the major reasons why I would strongly recommend listening to this album.

The Script is a tightly-knit three-piece – former R&B; producers Danny O'Donoghue and Mark Sheehan, and one time session musician Glen Power – that has been garnering the sort of ecstatic write-ups in its native Dublin that makes you suspect the reviewers must be family, friends or fully paid-up members of the fan club. This reviewer is none of those things, and can declare that their eponymously titled debut album reveals a band that is fresh, vital and ferociously good.

Album opener and debut single We Cry has already been laying an increasingly gold-paved path for the threesome. O'Donoghue's vocals, falling somewhere between Bono, Morten Harket, Eminem and Justin Timberlake, finds crisply articulate support from Sheehan's pointedly precise guitar commentaries and Power's no less eloquent percussive underpinning.

While reports of them as 'a whole new brand of Celtic Soul', maybe overdoing it, their catholic approach does manage to entail hip-hop, pop melodiousness, state-of-the-art production and anthemic rock.

For evidence of such pluralism, Rusty Halo offers up an intriguingly bizarre amalgam of The Police, Rush and Huey Lewis, Talk You Down has more than a hint of David Gray about it, and album closer I'm Yours is the kind of bedsit ballad destined for moist-eyed lighters-in-the-air status. Break Even is a stadium-filling confessional that will lay waste to vast tracts of America in due course.

Second single, The Man Who Can't Be Moved, wipes the floor with Coldplay, tramples all over Travis and flushes Starsailor down the pan to position The Script as the next big thing in waiting.

Intelligent, beautifully crafted and compelling.