What arr you Going to do with Your Life - Echo and the Bunnymen

What Are You Going To Do With Your Life? ( released in 1999) was the second Echo and the Bunnymen album after they reformed in 1997 and is a joy from start to finish. Mac sings as though he's having a mid-life crisis. The title track (which opens the album) obviously implies this and during the magnificent closing track Fools Like Us (the last Bunnymen song to feature the legendary Les Pattinson on bass which is up there with their best), he seems to doubt his own persona. "If I could be someone. Someone better than me", he sings. Whatever happened to Mac the Mouth from the Bunnymen's heyday in the 1980's? One of the things I love most about Ian ...  Read the complete review

There is a line sung on this album: "Everything's gonna be alright" It is a lyric that touches me in the happiest of moments. In this week, where we have all been reminded so brutally of humanity's capacity for cruelty and the fragility of human life, it sounds almost unbearably poignant and ineffectual. The horrors we've seen either make the delicate sentimentality of this album sound trite and indulgent, or they make it sound doubly precious - I am torn between the two conclusions. It is an album of autumnal hues, with acoustic guitars as crisp as frost and vocals as warm as fire-sides. There is indeed a preciousness to ...  Read the complete review