Keane have never been on first-name terms with fashion. Here was a trio of public-school boys who bypassed stylish musical adolescence and made straight for the kind of gilded-yet-bland territory that it took Elton John, Seal and Annie Lennox their entire careers to reach.

For their third album, however, they seem determined to alloy their undeniable knack for a belting chorus with something more, erm, current, enlisting two producers of cachet: Stuart Price, the man behind Madonna’s Confessions on a Dancefloor, and Jon Brion, who has worked with Kanye West and Rufus Wainwright. Their sound has duly been upholstered with expansive synths and 1980s bombast; the songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley even nods to Wainwright’s classical bent on Spiralling, which he says was influenced by Ovid’s Pygmalion.

Its widescreen pop is more reminiscent of late-period Then Jericho, however, while the similarly soaring The Lovers are Losing was custom-built for an imaginary video featuring aerial shots of Tom Chaplin against a yawning desert backdrop. Populism, for good or ill, is in Keane’s blood.

A more curious thing about the band is that Rice-Oxley writes the words but Chaplin sings them. So, when the singer was battling with drink and drugs around the time of their last album, Under the Iron Sea, his friend presented him with lyrics such as: “Fool, I wonder if you know yourself at all?”

While the musical mood of Perfect Symmetry is much more upbeat, there are several references to suicide: “Right between the eyes I won’t feel a thing,” over the pattering drum machines and filtered guitars o f You Haven’t Told Me Anything; “I took off my clothes and ran to the ocean, looking for somewhere to start anew” on Love is the End, a minor-key ballad that swells into a syrupy monster.

Has Rice-Oxley had enough? Is he feeling Chaplin’s pain? Or is he just a fan of Reginald Perrin? Whatever the reason, it never really intrudes on the music. Relentlessly melodious, relentlessly colourless, this is an album whose spiritual home is not the stadium, not the bedsit, but the television sports montage.

(Universal, TMS £12.99, call 0845 6026328)

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