SONG: "To the Sea" - Razorlight (Up All Night, 2004)

Like drippy daytime-radio staples Travis, it seems bizarre to think there was a time when Razorlight were considered one of the country’s most exciting young bands. However, back before Johnny Borrell bagged himself a celebrity girlfriend and started strutting round with his shirt off at Live 8, he and his cohorts were rightly regarded as British guitar music’s brightest hope. When I first saw the group supporting The Raveonettes in late 2003, they whipped through eight songs in practically no time, dispatching what were essentially throwaway numbers with a clarity and brusqueness that fully justified their pointed moniker. It was clear that Borrell was a hugely charismatic frontman being ably backed by a dynamic group of musicians: on tracks like Stumble and Fall, Bright Lights and Rip It Up the band was in its element, creating slicing indie-pop that remained fun and credible despite its obvious commercial intentions.


Nowadays of course such perceptions are a distant memory, eclipsed by the looming shadow of their mega-selling second album and its ubiquitous signature track (you know the one). Let’s get one thing cleared up before we go any further, lest there be any doubt as to where I stand on the issue: America is a crap song. It embodies everything detestable about that which Razorlight have now become: wafer-thin, pseudo-anthemic piffle characterised by horrible, U2-esque delay and supposedly impassioned bleating. Inevitably of course this was always going to be the track which brought them to the masses - it’s as if destiny itself had served up another cosy singalong for the Just Great Songs compilation (available now at your local supermarket for only £9.77). In a recent NME interview, Borrell earnestly described America as “a political song”; to be honest though, namedropping the world’s greatest superpower in the title seems less like an act of social subversion than a cynical ploy to help break the band overseas. The lyrical equivalent of an empty piece of sloganeering, the word “America” itself is largely meaningless within the context of the track – frankly, it could be called Superted and mean about as much as it does now. Worst of all – and this really is unforgivable - it sounds unnervingly like The Fray (though in their defence I suppose Razorlight weren’t to know that when they recorded the bastard).


It’s clear listening back to their debut album Up All Night and its ghastly follow-up single Somewhere Else that Borrell always had ideas above his station. At their core, Razorlight are a nifty three-minute pop band, pure and simple: the aforementioned Rip It Up is probably the best example of what they’re capable of when their formula is boiled down to its bare bones. However, when it came round to banging the tunes together for an LP, Borrell’s desire to create the World’s Greatest Debut finally got the better of him: whereas the tracks would’ve functioned more succinctly as individual stand-alones, instead we got fades between songs, drum solos and various pointless interludes designed to make the work more of a complete whole. Unfortunately for Borrell, it had quite the opposite effect – since the tracks bore little thematic relation to one another, the finished product played like a nearly-great album ruined by over-indulgence (witness the way the band make a spectacular hash of Don’t Go Back to Dalston, a great tune which gets completely lost up its own arse when they decide to have it implode midway through).


Amidst the frustration however there was one moment which bore the mark of genius Borrell seemed so keen to inherit. Arriving at the album’s tail-end with a riff cribbed straight from Television’s Marquee Moon, To the Sea is a sprawling breakneck stomp with lyrics scattered all over the shop. The song takes the gabbling stream-of-consciousness approach of their earlier ramble In the City and applies it to a frantic musical accompaniment which dips and soars with giddy zeal. Here, the ocean is an emblem of escape, a place of infinite possibility where the dreams of two restless souls will either be reconciled or simply washed away: “Just click your heels, turn around / We’ll get out of this old town… / We’ll leave it all to the sea”. However, despite brimming with optimism, Christian Smith-Pancorvo’s clattering drum-fills bring a sense of hesitation to the song’s relentless forward-march; by the time it reaches its beautiful, desolate conclusion (in which Borrell finds himself howling into nothingness before an expansive skyline), the singer’s wracked cries convey a longing far beyond his years.


To the Sea was the song which always stood out to me from the band’s early live set, and when I first heard the recorded version’s ludicrously overwrought ending I thought they’d properly chuffed it up. With hindsight though, it’s absolutely perfect: you can hear Borrell’s voice literally come apart as the closing chords slowly crash into infinity. During the build-up to its eventual fallout, Björn Ǻgren’s guitar weaves soulful melodies around the accompanying clamour while Borrell repeatedly pleads, “I know that your love lies somewhere…”; indeed, the song’s agonising deceleration is made all the more painful by its insistent early fervour. When it eventually dies away we are left with only a quiet piano accompanied by a stream of mournful feedback: just another broken promise in an endless sea of dreams.


To the Sea is a poetic whirlwind of a song, a true revelation for a band whose anything-is-possible rhetoric and youthful exuberance were unduly stifled by one man’s ruthless quest for stadium-sized grandeur. This is the moment when Borrell’s blinding ambition and appetite for excess butted heads with his actual ability and came up solid-gold. They’ll never top it; like so many bands that rise to prominence with their first album, by the time they attempted to recapture its strengths they’d lost sight of what it was that made them so exhilarating in the first place. But for five-and-a-half glorious minutes, the romanticism of Borrell’s lost-in-the-city shtick was transformed into something far greater than even he could’ve imagined.