Single Review: The Script – ‘Man On A Wire’
1 min read
Irish pop-rock band The Script is currently filling arenas on their No Sound Without Silence Tour, named after their fourth studio album.
Third single Man on the Wire continues the band’s reputation for safe, radio-friendly pop-rock. The track is certainly an inoffensive love song. There’s that charming Irish inflection in frontman Danny O’Donoghue’s vocals at the end of lines like ‘cause and effect’.
However, the lyrics mundanely go over how strangely devoted someone can be and what this does to the other person. The song may be about a man on the tightrope and having his ‘heart… in (his) throat’, but it doesn’t have that jawdropping high that is worthy of the title. This is so, despite a melody in the chorus yo-yoing up and down the musical scale at first, in a promising yet futile attempt to build-up to a climax that never comes. When O’Donoghue simply repeats ‘I’m a man, I’m a man, on a wire’, listeners may think, is that it? The song is just…there and doesn’t provoke and stop listeners in their tracks. Not to mention, the band’s arrangement is pedestrian at best, even with the strings belatedly erupting towards the end.
This latest single is a musically uninspired effort for the band, sounding more like greatest-hits filler than an offering worthy of its stature.
