Then again they're probably right, it's a fair bet that Black Crowes comeback album's going to be a bit av.
Foo FightersEchoes, Patience, Silence and Grace
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, chances are it's not a fucking squirrel. This looks like a Foo Fighters album, sounds like a Foo Fighters album, smells like a Foo Fighters album and may indeed taste like one, should the collective offerings of Hairy Dave, Nirvanan drumkit wrangler extraordinaire and his mates, actually taste like anything at all. If they did, it'd probably be Burger King. You know the ingredients, you know the constituents, you know the target audience. It'll probably taste marginally less than the sum of its parts, but you knew that when you walked in the door.
Which is not to say that EPSG is a poor album, or a derivative one. It's just a little hard to differentiate from the others. Distinguishing between Fooies albums wasn't always this hard - there was the first one, on which Dave did everything but operate the CD pressing machine and drive the delivery truck to the wholesalers; the second, which sounded like the first with better written songs; the third, which had Michael Klim's neck tattoo on it and was more laid back; the fourth, a bit grumpier and edgier following a bunch of drug problems for most concerned and Dave's moonlighting with the Queens of the Stone Age; the fifth, the infamous double album with 'hard' and 'soft' CDs, the hard being almost too shouty to be listenable, the soft more middle of the road than that 'roo which the last semi through cleaned up; and now the sixth, which sounds like... the average of all of the above. With stronger statistical weighting to the mellower tones of There Is Nothing Left To Lose and the soft half of In Your Honor.
Spin it: The film clip for The Pretender kicks just as much arse as the song itself; also watch enthralled as Super Dave hands out props to the Beaconsfield miners (Ballad Of The Aforementioned) and slapdowns for the emo brigade (Cheer Up Boys, Your Makeup Is Running).
Bin it: Like pretty much all the Fooies albums, EPSG begins with a generous helping of strong, engaging, well-constructed songs, then goes wandering off on its own without much of an idea of where it's off to or what it's trying to say when it gets there. The Colour and the Shape was the original prototype for unfocused Fooie efforts, but this fits the mould neatly as well. Pity, because in seven albums of material, there's probably three or four excellent, coherent albums which the Foo Fighters might have released, had a more ruthless hand been at the producers' desk.
Bollocks rating: To co-opt the same miserable cop-out which several 'professional' reviewers also took with this disc - if you're a Foo Fighters fan, you'll love it. Which is a piss-poor attempt to review an album but is, based on the above dissertation, actually true. Rating: Three drummer jokes out of five.
AirbourneRunnin' Wild
Oh, Christ. They're taking the piss, surely? Frizzy mullets, shirts off, leather pants - and that's just the album cover, our four fearless bogan heroes bustin' out of H.M. Pentridge and, well, Runnin' Wild. This has the potential to be either very good, or very, very bad.
To cut to the chase, it's the former. This album is genuinely, un-ironically, fist-pumpingly brilliant. And more to the point, it's more fun that a bouncy castle full of cheerleaders. It's easy to sneer - in fact it's a requirement of the position - but these boys are a hell of a lot more than an AC/DC tribute band. To be fair, there's a bit of Rose Tattoo in there as well, and some Angels if you squint hard enough. This is Australian pub rock at its finest - a genre of music which is, in fact, one of Australia's greatest (and only) contributions to modern music, one which simply doesn't exist elsewhere in the western world. Bogans like the O'Keeffe brothers invented pub rock, along with circlework in RSL carparks. The riffs are the size of monster trucks, Joel O'Keeffe's howl is resonantly equidistant between Bon and Brian, and the lyrics range from appropriately seedy to profoundly wrong - case in point What's Eatin' You, which relates a first-person tale of banging two sisters at once while Daddy bangs on the door with his gun in his hand (ahem), and resonates with the artfully constructed hook 'I've got just one wood, six holes to play/Things ain't fair on this fairway...'
But what really carries this album, other than monster-truck riffs and gutter smut, is that it's actually an impressively coherent offering, as determined by the ultimate test of album listenability, the Car Stereo test (i.e. leave the fucker in your CD player for a week and see if there's any tracks you start skipping; zero marks off for the Warrnambool contingent.)
Spin it: All good Track Ones should be a statement of intent, defining the band and its message. In that vein, please welcome Stand Up For Rock And Roll, as impressive in that role as Smells Like Teen Spirit or Hells Bells. Likewise the lead single Too Much, Too Young, Too Fast carries more AC/DC signatures than Angus Young's chequebook. But it's all good. Embrace your inner bogan - shake your fist in the air in traffic, air-guitar with your seatbelt and drum furiously on the dashboard.
Bin it: Only if youse are some kind of fucken city poofta.
Bollocks verdict: An unprecedented, and unironic, five bourbon-and-cokes out of five.
GrinspoonAlibis And Other Lies
All Hail The Spon! Triple J's inaugural Unearthed winners - not that they seem to get any J airplay any more - and Your Correspondent's local neighbourbood rock band, having emerged from just up the road from the World of Bollocks.
However, things haven't been so rosy in Sponland in recent times. As detailed in endless cheap gags in this august tome, Grinner-in-chief Phil Jamieson spent most of 2006-07 either munted on P (I know it's called ice where he lives, but naming a drug after wee-wees is funnier), coming down from being munted on P, or nicking stuff from his bandmates to take to Theft Converters so he could buy more P to go and get munted on, or reluctantly attending rehab so he could stop himself from getting munted on P. Somewhere amidst all that, the lads wrote, recorded and polished Alibis And Other Lies for the listening public, and by the time it hit the shelves, Phil was clean again (relatively speaking) and the lads were ripe to go and rock the Big Day Out like a bunch of mad bastards.
So the Spon are back! Is it good to have the Spon back? Hell yeah!!! Does it mean their new album is any good? Not really!!! No, unfortunately it's a bit pants. But then again Grinspoon albums are usually a bit patchy - even their finest overall effort, 1999's Easy, had the odd potholes which needed to be skipped over. The songs that are good, are very, very good. Pity there's less than a handful of them.
Spin it: Black Tattoo is vehement old-school Grinspoon all over, and is thunderous. Meanwhile Choirboy and What You Got are new-school Grinspoon (think Hard Act To Follow rather than DCX3) and are equally fucking tops; in fact Choirboy may be this reviewer's new favourite Spon song of all time, it's that immense. As the Captain observed, cowbells are where it's at.
Bin it: Well, don't bin it, just don't buy it. Just buy the above three off iTunes, plus Living In The City. Then go and buy the Airbourne album instead.
Bollocks verdict: Completely bipolar in personality. And therefore a return to consistency from the Spon, whose albums are usually unlistenable navel-gazing brightened by the occasional furiously good rock song, like The Vines on different drugs. Three green P spoons out of five.
The ChecksHunting Whales
The Checks are a Kiwi band who burst onto the scene here as long-haired teenagers with an unearthly ability to kick it like a '60s British invasion blues-rock band - think early Stones, Kinks, Who and the like. Their 2005 debut single What You Heard received plenty of rotation on radio and music TV and remains fucking immense. Since then the Checks have been touring with the demented intensity of a circus full of carneys (is there any other kind? Other than Cirque du Soleil which is a circus full of haughty French-Canadian acrobat types), have refined their act on the gig circuit in Engerland and been lauded by the British music press as the Next Big Thing, which of course means they're completely fucked now. And now, finally, they're released their first long-player, with a provocative name (Hunting Whales) and an equally provocative cover (the big sister of the baby off Nevermind in similar pose. Probably. Camel toe ahoy, anyway.)
And yet, despite all that, it's a bit... inconsistent? Is this becoming a theme? (Or is album covers in monochrome the theme for this week?) For the best songs on the album, the ones which engage the lister immediately and have something interesting to 'say' (in a musical sense rather than lyrical - can't expect a bunch of nascent twenty-somethings to have anything illuminatory to say given their life experience of roughly 15 minutes) are... the original single What You Heard and its B-side, the album opener Mercedes Children (presumably written about the other snotty rich kids being dropped off to school at Takapuna College on Auckland's North Shore).
Spin it: What You Heard, Mercedes Children and the title track.
Bin it: All of which are either singles or B-sides on singles. Making the point of purchasing the entire album as an integrated continuum... what, exactly? Then again, 'C' for Checks is only a bit to the right of 'A' for Airbourne, so at least you've not got far to walk to go buy something better.
Bollocks verdict: Three Takapuna tractors (any pretentious Euro-luxo 4WD which only goes off road if the driveway to the polo club is gravel) out of five.
The HivesThe Black And White Album
The long awaited followup to whatever it was they called the long-awaited followup to Your New Favourite Band, the album (really actually a hits compilation) which launched the Hives onto an international forum at the same time as bands like the Vines, the Strokes and the White Stripes were kicking off the New Rock Revolution (TM and copyright New Musical Express Publications, 2001). Despite being largely unheard of before then outside their native Sweden, the Hives have actually been around for more than 10 years. So, like the Fooies and the Grinners, they long ago ran out of new ideas and are scratching about for new ones. Unfortunately their old ideas were better. Throwing fistfuls of production, copious amounts of electronic fiddling and collaborating pointlessly with tossers like Timbaland ain't going to change that, lads.
Spin it: Single Tick, Tick, Tick... Boom crashes along spectacularly, as does the filmclip. Try It Again, which scored a bit of J play, and Square One Here I Come are fair efforts as well.
Bin it: The remainder of the album is full of poorly thought out discombobulations, weird shit, and the odd idea which might have worked had they executed it properly. Much like its predecessor, the one which came after Your New Favourite Band. Veni Vidi Vicious, which leant most of its content to Your New Favourite Band, proved the Hives could actually write a good album (as distinct from a handful of singles.) This and the last album proves they're too concerned with being famous to bother doing so. But they're still handy live, apparently.
Bollocks verdict: The Black And White Album? Haven't they all been? Did the printery run out of colour ink this week? At least Airbourne had some red text on theirs. Buy that one instead. Two and a half back-issues of Black and White magazine out of five. Actually, buy that instead, at least it had photos of vaguely famous starlets with their kit off.
The Doctor is OUT to go listen to the Airbourne album again.
Stand the fuck up for rock and roll, motherfuckers.
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