The Queen Elizabeth Theatre is packed with clean-looking kids in an ecstasy of polite mania, mostly girls. Surely they're not wetting themselves over the ungainly, albeit crisply dressed pudding with the country-club dance moves up on stage? Tom Chaplin, the note- perfect crooner in question, resembles husky '80s Yaz vocalist Alison Moyet, only not so butch. In other words, he ain't Elvis. Clearly that's not important anymore, because the endearingly earnest Chaplin even got rushed by a lady during the encore. She moved fast. Faster than you'd think after an entire hour of Keane's sedative Coldplay distillate.

Okay, that's unfair. The band has two hits in its pocket on these shores, both of them excellent examples of a sound that Britain has been exporting on the back of a certain Radiohead song for many years now. It could be described as a melancholy rapture, tastefully brimming with romance and hurt, and the chicks, plus the pleasant young men they hold hands with, love it. Keane is a tremendous practitioner of the art but the effect of all those dazzling piano arpeggios, cascading melodies, surging choruses, and the same mid-tempo 4/4 beat is frankly wearying after a while. It's also puzzling how all the nebulous lyrical concerns connect with anyone, with all the trite references to "meeting on the other side". This is content? Highlights included Chaplin's shirt coming untucked at one point and drummer Richard Hughes twatting himself in the head with a drumstick during "Everybody's Changing".

That song especially gave the performance some lift. Otherwise, it seemed that Keane was often buoyed only by the crowd's ample goodwill and its own courtliness. "Sometimes you get a special feeling that what you're doing really means something," said Chaplin at the evening's end. As the room audibly swooned, he added, "Thank you Calgary!" Just kidding. "Somewhere Only We Know"—the other hit and it's also a doozy—ended the night. Keane does a fine job of its anodyne, BMW rock but it's complacent music, reflecting a torpor that has gripped Cool Brittania for some time now. Emotionally, the trio is a far cry from the fitful young Radiohead that wrote the template all those years ago, but it's so easy to like that we forget we can't see the forest for the fake plastic trees.

Georgia Straight, May 2005