White Lies preview

White Lies
Double Door, Chicago
Friday, April 3, 2009

The British press is nearly unanimous when it comes to recent charttoppers White Lies: shamelessly derivative, lyrically unsteady, and almost certain to be as big, if not bigger than The Killers.

Sporting a similarly unhealthy ’80s fetish, White Lies leave The Killers alone with their Duran Duran records and instead run everything they know about goth, Julian Cope, and a romanticized notion of Ian Curtis through the Twilight franchise ringer. The product of youngsters, To Lose My Life (Geffen), is adorably infatuated with death (though rather untimely, as similar-sounding Editors dropped an album on the subject barely 18 months prior). The quality of Life thus far has been and can be distilled into two types of lyrics: top notch (“Let’s grow old together/and die at the same time”) or eye-rolling (“I saw a friend that I once knew at a funeral”).

But somehow these brats make it work. Lead single “Death” has a stately pomp despite the lyrics’ obsession with fear, while the title track opens with a shameless homage to Joy Division but hits on a shattering, self-built chorus that makes you think, “By God, Brandon Flowers must be shitting himself.”

Friendly Fires and The Soft Pack open.

– Steve Forstneger

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