Albums

Album Review: The Vines

[Album: Melodia]
[Label: Cooking Vinyl]

2002 was a great year for The Vines. It saw them release their debut album, ‘Highly Evolved’, and it’s powerful anthemic quality saw them shift nearly 2 million copies. That got them lumped in with The White Stripes and The Strokes, and subsequently Kings Of Leon, as pioneers in heralding the raging return of influential rock music to the mainstream. Since then, the band has hit a wall, with frontman Craig Nicholls erratic behaviour leading to a diagnosis of Asperger’s, and a lukewarm reception for their subsequent two albums resulting in them switching record labels. So is this fourth effort the herald of a new dawn for the band or more of the same?

Well, the band have retained that ability to crank out high-velocity slabs of garage rock and make them fit easily alongside psychedelic, summery soliloquys. However, sadly, there is little here that will raise the heartbeat above a snail’s pace. There is very little bite or fizz and any crack has been ham-fistedly plastered in high-end production values. The resultant sound is a rather ineffectual gloop of meandering melodies. Nothing excites above the odd spot of extra-dirty, hammered guitar. The whole album comprises two-minute morsels with the final running time amounting to a mere half-hour. Hardly, a total that offers value for money.

‘Get Out’ kicks us off and is bizarrely reminiscent of L7 with it’s three-chord sequences, walking harmonies and grunged-up guitar strumming. It’s proof enough that the band haven’t exactly built on their early foundations as much as perhaps we could have expected. New single ‘He’s A Rocker’ pounds out a tight bassline and layers more of the same vocals on top. The band appear to be parodying themselves in places - yes, it really is that generic. The slower tracks are markedly lethargic with ‘True As The Night’ at 6:07 really taking the biscuit. How it qualifies it’s length (the nearest to it is 2:26) is utterly beyond me. There’s an orchestral backfill and Nicholls’ vocal is at it’s clearest but the same old tiresome trio of chords (are you spotting a pattern here) are repeated ad infinitum and the bored delivery does little to threaten anything but the eyelids.

Hey, it’s not all bad. ‘Braindead’ has a bouncing verse and a blazing chorus of scorched and fuzzed-up vocals featuring a yelping embittered enough to raise the Devil himself - “Ow! / Dead in the brain / is your claim to fame / I live by the sound.” But with ’Merrygoround’ it’s a return to type and a song-title that shows remarkable insight into quite what this album represents - a distinct sense of déjà vu. I’d hate to think this was the last effort from The Vines but unless they start evolving I can’t see them clinging on much longer.

For Fans Of: Kings Of Leon, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, The Datsuns

Band Link:
The Vines

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