The Academic’s Tales from the Backseat from 2018 was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed debut that ought to have made The Academic a bigger deal on a global scale. The Westmeath band’s second album treads a similar course, with plenty of strong melodies, commercial appeal and a sense of playfulness.
Yet while The Academic have always had a propensity for songs with stadium-sized choruses, do they have the charisma to make those songs sound original?
Sitting Pretty, a record about “navigating life in your twenties”, leaves that question frustratingly unanswered. These are songs that could have gone toe-to-toe with Kaiser Chiefs, The Killers et al in the mid-noughties, but that’s not necessarily an accolade in 2023.
The band come bursting out of the traps with the excellent Supergrass-esque Pushing Up Daisies; the scuzzy warble of organ on Don’t Take It Personally and the harmonies on the 1980s-influenced This Is Your Life are a delight. My Very Best and the hip-swinging disco of Heartbreak’s Where It’s At sound like they’ve been pulled straight from a John Hughes film soundtrack.
Protein: Are we eating enough of it? And is ‘high protein’ branding just a fad?
Cameron Diaz: ‘I left movies because I wanted to live my life differently. We started our family, and that was all I wanted to do’
Aoibhinn Ní Shúilleabháin: ‘I mourned friendships for too long that were actually past their time’
‘The phone would ring and it would be Mike Scott from the Waterboys or Bono from U2. Everyone wanted to talk to my father’
Still, there’s a sense that it’s all been done before, and that four-piece are capable of more. The Academic are a fine band, but apparently still seeking the special ingredient that sets them apart from their influences. As a result, much of Sitting Pretty falls into the inauspicious “pleasant, but forgettable” category.
