Even on the energetic opener “The Rib of a Broken Umbrella”, the band never reaches its full capacity until the last minute of the song, letting the tempo drive the song forward for the preceding four minutes. Given the band’s poppy style, the longer songs run the risk of getting old and overdoing themselves, but throughout the album’s hour duration, Bell X1 shows incredible restraint. Upon first glance, the album immediately appears more grandiose than Flock with much longer songs on average and titles like “The Great Defector”. More varied than Flock, Blue Lights on the Runway is the band’s latest opus, accomplishing everything their contemporaries have attempted in the last few years in one fell swoop. They embrace it in full stride, reaching a new level of softheartedness on “Light Catches Your Face” and “The Curtains Are Twitchin'”.
However, the latest album from the Irish collective, Blue Lights on the Runway, signifies that they have not forgotten Rice’s delicacy. Bell X1, on the other hand, have evolved into a well-rehearsed arena rock band, ready to overtake bands like Franz Ferdinand and Coldplay with both great musicianship and catchy songwriting.
Rice’s solo work represents a delicate tenderness that can, at any given moment, explode into a cathartic passion that expresses the deepest emotions in all of us. After Bell X1’s previous album, Flock, the fact that Damien Rice was the original singer of this band (at the time named Jupiter) seemed irrelevant.
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