Hothouse Flowers – Into Your Heart

To give you an idea of how familiar the new Hothouse Flowers album is, consider the following song titles: The End Of The Road, Hallelujah, Santa Monica, and Better Man. Incidentally, those arent covers of, respectively, Boyz II Men, Leonard Cohen, Everclear, or Pearl Jam; theyre just part of a set of cliches deployed by this Irish quartet.

Hothouse Flowers deploys them skillfully, it must be said; the band remains proficient in the art of reheating rock n roll patterns. Most of that heat belongs to singer Liam O Maonlai, who ties together the most soulful vocal traits of Van Morrison and Bono. Hes also a sharp journeyman instrumentalist, blowing fine harmonica through the breezes of Alright and gently keying the languidly thoughtful piano melody of Feel Like Living.

His bandmates guitarist Fiachna O Braonain, bassist Peter OToole and drummer Dave Clarke have no problem keeping up, though in this context that means little more than following an easy song to its most predictable conclusion.

Occasionally, as in the opening track, Your Love Goes On, OToole grafts a computer-generated rhythm onto the foursquare tune, but bands such as the Jay-hawks have already taken that sort of modest experimentation further. And for all O Maonlais efforts to squeeze maximum emotion from the lyrics, those words never quite break past what any bar band in any country could write.

Into Your Heart closes with a live rendition of an Irish traditional song, Si Do Mhamo I, that suggests a more interesting path, but its a path Hothouse Flowers doesnt pursue. The road here is run down by overuse.