Back in the late nineties one of our favourite TV shows, MTV’s Up For It: Live ended after host Eddy Temple Morris and his geeky side-kick Zane Lowe (whatever happened to him?) decided they’d rather kill off the show than carry on in the direction the channel wanted to go. The last show ended with Stereophonics doing a poignant live acoustic rendition of Traffic. It was pretty emotional for a 16-year-old. It’s even more emotional now, when you consider that 16-year-olds today probably don’t remember when MTV even played music at all. But we digress.
The point is that back then, we were quite big Stereophonics fans. They were a band that had some great songs, and even when they began to get a bit shit, they’d occasionally come back with a stomper. A couple of years ago they released this which became their first single not to chart at all. We loved it though, and were reminded of it again when it featured in Jimmy McGovern's Accused on BBC, during that heart-wrenching sequence depicting Stephen Graham and Sean Bean’s blossoming romance. But we’re digressing again.
So now Kelly and the lads, minus Stuart Cable (RIP), have a new album out and it’s one that we really want to be quite good. And it sort of is.
The album does suffer from what many of its predecessors did, in that lot of the melodies sound like they were recorded as the band were falling asleep. That said, Indian Summer is rousing, Take Me is haunting, Violins & Tamborines feels like forgettable filler until it’s last act where it ascends to an epic Bondian (have we invented a sub-genre?) finale. The whole album feels quite cinematic actually, with In a Moment sounding like it would appear on the opening credits of an action-noir (UPDATE: On second listen we decided that it’s basically Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me :((). Been Caught Cheating is simple and devastating and lovely and we will probably learn it and sing it outside someone’s window at 3am, in the RAIN. We reckon Roll the Dice should be the next single.
We’re not disappointed, we not hugely excited either. But we’re optimistic that we will like it more next week than we do today.