Hey! Maybe you’ll like this! It’s full of nice tunes that aren’t too objectionable, played on the electric guitar just like Those Libertines Who Do Take Drugs And Are All Over The Popular Daily Gossip Papers In London England Where The Jam Once Lived. And they’re Swedish! We could launch the album at Ikea! It’ll be a riot! Or so a meeting in a boardroom somewhere between here and Stockholm in the not too distant past probably went. Pop culture is a funny old phenomenon, innit. Undoubtedly orchestrated more than we’d sometimes care to admit, by unscrupulous men that we pretend don’t exist, it still is and has to be pure at source, or so we like to believe.
But there inevitably comes a point during every cultural explosion when someone will naively attempt to bottle Thames water and pass it off as Evian – or in this instance probably bottle Evian and try to pass it off as authentic Thames water. There are 14 prime examples of why this doesn’t work on this record. To give them their dues, about a quarter of these songs don’t sound like they were half-inched off ‘Up The Bracket’. The problem is that they sound like Cast.
Just to cover all those British bases and give the impression that all they could tune the studio TV into was some VH1 mid-90s rundown, a good handful of the songs sound like they’re sung in tribute to Noel Gallagher’s big head (take ‘God Knows’ and ‘Next To be Lowered’). But that’s rubbish in itself as everyone knows that his Oasis tunes were just a ridiculous ego-trip and Liam should have put his fist through Noel’s teeth the moment he came up with the idea of singing ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ himself. The spud. But we digress. The majority of the record is led by the spirit of John Power in Carl Barat’s head – bottom-shelf bargain bin stuff all the way.
And do you even have to remove a chink of grit from between your teeth? No, because it’s just bottled water.