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The Fray's second album comes apart at the seams

The Fray represents almost everything that's wrong with popular rock in this day and age. With a mediocre (and self-titled) sophomore album, this Top-40-targeting band confirms its musical ineptitude and its inability to write engaging lyrics.

It has been almost three and a half years since the band's debut album, "How to Save a Life" (2005), during which time the band has released two live albums and only a sprinkling of new singles -- an incongruity that only proves The Fray's determination to wring every single dime out of its first LP. With any band's second studio album, critics and fans alike hope musicians will underscore and improve upon the sound of their debut, while simultaneously maturing as a group by taking their music and lyrics in a fresh, bold and new direction. The longer the interval between albums, the greater these expectations become. The Fray, however, fails miserably to live up to fans' hopes or improve their music in any way.

"The Fray" opens with the bland, if energetic, "Syndicate," a song about, unsurprisingly, a girl. There is, though, some random abstract imagery thrown in for good measure. The best thing that can be said about this opener is that the melody at least matches the innocuousness of the lyrics. The exact same, uninspired piano-rock tones that are the hallmark of the band's sound remain utterly unchanged and just as formulaic-sounding as ever.

Unfortunately, lead singer Isaac Slade's soporific, sore-throat moan has not progressed into anything less grating. He delivers his platitudes about such common themes as love, loneliness and, perhaps most irritating of all, God, on the band's Christian-rock-pandering single, "You Found Me." Probably trying to be edgy, Slade opens the tune, saying "I found God/ on the corner of First and Amistad/ where the West was all but won/ smoking his last cigarette..." He manages to sound both depressing and preachy at the same time.

The album's worst quality is that all of the songs sound entirely the same, not only lyrically but melodically as well. The album plays as though the band, stumped during the songwriting process, wrote the names of the same five chords on slips of paper and then picked these pieces from a jar at random to determine the progression of each song. And this scenario isn't too far-fetched. The Fray originally drew its name from a suggestion jar put out at a party.

"The Fray" leads listeners to wonder if the band decided that its debut album was just too rhythmically and instrumentally complex for the general public. The entire album relies far too heavily on Isaac Slade's persistent and monotonous piano chords and not enough on guitarists Joe King and Dave Welsh. The Fray would also benefit from the addition of an actual, permanent bassist, who, if nothing else, could add a layer of sonic diversity to this band's excuse for music. Riffs would be nice, too -- any sort of interesting riffs, from any of the instruments.

With its latest album, The Fray has delivered nothing but monotonous pop. At least band members had the presence of mind to name it after themselves. It's anyone's guess as to why, other than monetary gain, this uninspired band even bothered to make a second album in the alternative rock genre. With a little luck, The Fray may eventually realize just how unbelievably bad it is at creating even remotely inspired music, and take mercy upon the world of rock by resigning itself to a career as a second-rate Coldplay cover band.