Technology and music

In this video the band talk about their live stadium performances that will commence in 2011, also talk about the technology they are able access and use when on stage, from lighting Riggs, to the visual images that can be shown on stage to give visual stories to the songs they are playing. Also talking about the success the band are having with the release of Science and Faith and giving thanks to the fans who make it all possible.

What the newspaper have to say

The chorus to a pop song can be a wonderful thing. No matter how unsettling or scratchy the verse, no matter how atonal and challenging the bridge, everything comes right in the joyous rush of a decent chorus. The chorus is where storm-clouds are parted, waves calm, and sunshine lights up the darkest corners of the human soul as abruptly as fluorescent strip-lights in a scary cellar.

The Script have just such a chorus, and they know it: so much so that it has been crammed, with minor trims and fiddles, into almost every song on their second album. It’s their secret weapon, a chugging, stately thing which is designed to be equally at home in a stadium sing-along or as the soundtrack to an emotional montage in a TV drama.

What they do is set up a four (or sometimes three) chord trick, where the piano and bass play an urgent four-beats-to-the-bar and Danny O'Donoghue urgently crams a ton of words into a short melodic fragment, which he repeats a lot. He gets to rant and hoot, and they get to strike a few epic rock poses. Everyone’s a winner.

You can tell he loves his hip hop as much as his Keane and U2 – although let’s not get carried away, it’s Keane that win, by a mile – and his sandpaper croon carries a lot of emotional force, particularly on lovelorn snuggles like For the First Time and Nothing.
The downside of relying on this one good idea quite so much – apart from the rising suspicion that you’re stuck in a musical mirror-maze – is that songs which are not blessed with The Chorus seem to be half-finished. Walk Away, for example, is a moodier beast than everything else on offer, being closer to Eminem’s self-piteous darkness than Coldplay’s sunny optimism. But after a heap of consecutive Big Chorus songs, it’s hard to escape the feeling that something has been mislaid. Luckily, it’s not a problem anyone has to put up with for very long.(BBC review review 06-09-2010)

This Dublin trio's Sting-soundalike leader, Danny O'Donoghue, says the follow-up to their 2m-selling debut was inspired by "the journey from a feeling of devastation in the pit of my stomach", which might prime you for Leonard Cohen-ish weltschmerz, rather than manicured Celt-rock. O'Donoghue's sincerity as a writer is plain – the single For the First Time reveals his guilt at being successful while friends are suffering from the collapse of the Celtic Tiger – but the production is such a high-shine, epic affair that it all sounds incredibly pedestrian. Mid-tempo guitar rock prevails; so does O'Donoghue's way of raspily soaring through choruses as if his voice has broken free from its moorings. The best moment is easily If You Ever Come Back – not for the startling burst of rapping midway through, but for one sweet line: "If you ever come back, there'll be a smile on my face and the kettle on." (The Guardian 09/10/2010)