Atlanta Music category interest

ATLANTA — Keane and singer Tom Chaplin are a band and a man reborn.

Twenty years have passed since Keane released “Hopes and Fears,” a near-perfect debut of piano-driven pop songs marked by Chaplin’s sumptuous tenor and keyboardist Tim Rice-Oxley’s indelible melodies and heart-on-his-sleeve lyrics.

Led by the massive single “Somewhere Only We Know,” “Hopes and Fears” connected with a global audience, selling millions of copies during a particularly fertile period for British rock bands.

Childhood friends Chaplin and Rice-Oxley were not prepared for the whirlwind that followed. Chaplin, especially, struggled; substance abuse nearly killed him. In 2013, Keane went on indefinite hiatus.

Eventually, the singer and the band fought their way back. Keane resumed recording and performing in 2019. New fans discovered Keane via social media; “Somewhere Only We Know” has surpassed 1.6 billion streams on Spotify.

Chaplin, Rice-Oxley, co-founding drummer Richard Hughes and bassist Jesse Quin are on tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of 2004's “Hopes and Fears.” Newfound social media success aside, the album is also being celebrated via resurgent old-school mediums.

Remastered at Abbey Road Studios in London, the "Hopes and Fears 20" reissue is available on CD, as a single LP in “galaxy vinyl” — the surface looks more like smoke than stars — and a two-LP edition with B-sides and other rarities. The “galaxy vinyl” reissue sounds fresh and full, reiterating just how consistently strong “Hopes and Fears” is from start to finish.

And as a jubilant, triumphant show in Atlanta last Saturday demonstrated, Keane 2.0 is finally able to fully realize, and appreciate, all that is great about that album.

An unmistakable tenor

The Eastern is a 2,200-capacity concert venue within Atlanta Dairies, an urban renewal mixed-use community built on the former site of an industrial dairy in Atlanta’s Reynoldstown neighborhood.

Opened in 2021, The Eastern is now a regular Atlanta stop for top-tier New Orleans acts. Trombone Shorty andamp; Orleans Avenue and Big Freedia are headed there Oct. 5, followed by Juvenile, Mannie Fresh and Hot Boy Turk on Nov. 20.

The Eastern is reminiscent of New Orleans’ Fillmore, but it is affiliated with AEG Presents instead of rival Live Nation — and boasts much better sight lines. The Eastern brings the crowd close to the action thanks to a wide stage, wraparound balconies and a multi-tiered, standing-room-only, second-story bleacher section. Even the sold-out Keane show didn’t feel over-crowded.

Chaplin, too, was impressed. Not long after bounding onstage Saturday in an unbuttoned short-sleeve atop a T-shirt — like his bandmates, he gave cool-dad vibes — he made a point of saluting the venue.

He is almost unrecognizable compared to his younger self. Two decades ago, his round face was topped by a thick helmet of dark, unruly hair.

Now 45, he’s trim, with more sharply defined features and close-cropped, meticulously styled salt-and-pepper hair.

But his tenor is still unmistakable.

At times it evokes Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, minus Yorke’s more avant-garde tendencies. Chaplin can go high without sacrificing richness or strength. If anything, his voice is even richer now, even more capable of conveying melancholy, hope, fear, redemption and joy.

'Keane? About damn time'

That was evident during the band’s two hours onstage in Atlanta. They revisited nine of the 12 tracks from “Hopes and Fears” interspersed with other songs from the Keane catalog. The opening “Can’t Stop Now” was followed by “Silenced By the Night,” from 2012’s “Strangeland,” the album that marked the beginning of the end of Keane’s first chapter.

After the big energy and big chorus of “Bend and Break,” they shifted gears to the more challenging “Leaving So Soon?,” from 2006’s “Under the Iron Sea.”

Late in the set, Chaplin briefly strapped on and strummed an electric guitar. But mostly the music consisted of keyboards, bass and drums.

In concert, such a configuration requires a vigorous rhythm section, which an animated Quin and a rock-steady Hughes provided. Rice-Oxley, though bound to his keyboard, pumped his left leg like a piston in time with the beat.

A beaming Chaplin was personable and profoundly grateful as he bantered with fans and urged on an audience that needed very little urging to cheer louder. He gleefully recalled the Southern accent of a staffer at Atlanta’s Music Midtown festival who greeted the late-arriving musicians years ago: “Keane? About damn time.”

“We say that all the time to each other,” Chaplin noted.

He may be in a better place now, but still empathizes with those who are not. He prefaced the surging “The Way I Feel” with, “I see a lot of joyful faces in the crowd. If anyone out there is having a bad day, or a bad week, or bad month, or bad year, it’s OK. You’ll get through it. And this next song is dedicated to you.”

He reflected on his past struggles. “For me personally, around that time of ‘Hopes and Fears,’ it was glorious, this amazing rise. Everything that happened was so exhilarating. Of course, what goes up must come down. About a year after the recording came out, I found myself feeling very isolated and very unhappy. Which was strange because I was living my dream."

He continued, “Music is a great thing because it can reach out to us in times of trouble and make us feel like we’re not alone. I guess that was maybe the purpose of Tim writing this next song. He was trying to reach out to me.

“In light of these much happier times that we’re living in now as a band, it’s a very poignant song for me to sing and for us to play.”

With that, Chaplin took a seat at a keyboard and ushered in the church organ of “Hamburg Song.” He sang, with all his emotive power, “I don't want to be adored, don't want to be first in line or make myself heard/I'd like to bring a little light, to shine a light on your life/To make you feel loved.”

Elsewhere, he opened up his voice full-throttle on the ballad “We Might As Well Be Strangers.” The band revved up with “Is It Any Wonder?,” pulled back again for the falsetto ballad “She Has No Time,” then cruised through “This Is the Last Time,” which rode, like so many songs, on Quin’s rubbery bass lines. A singalong “Somewhere Only We Know” finished off the main set.

“Bedshaped,” the moody closing track on “Hopes and Fears,” concluded the encore, affording Chaplin one more chance to sculpt his voice over a dynamic arrangement constructed by Rice-Oxley, Hughes and Quin.

Earlier, when orchestrating an audience singalong, he uncorked a soaring “whoa ho ho hoooooooo, whoa ho ho hooo….” refrain. When the audience tried to replicate it en masse, he offered good-natured criticism: “You went a bit fast. You got a bit ahead of yourselves. Take your time. Enjoy it. This is your moment.”

On their 20th anniversary “Hopes and Fears” tour, he and his bandmates are heeding their own advice.