James Arden checks out the garage rockers latest album.
The Christian rock band from Brighton bring religion to the masses.
Recipe for modern R'n'B album: liberal helpings of guest rappers and an overdose of sexual euphemisms.
I like nice things. They are good,” so once said my friend in all innocent seriousness. “Really?” I responded. “Yes. Good things are also nice,” she ventured.
Not the most articulate exchange, but she is right. Good things are nice, and The Corrections’ album is no exception to this diktat. Before I get started, I’ll say two things: 1) The album isn’t brilliant. It must be seen on a spectrum of Good Things, and it makes a “nice”, which is a sort of grey-ish, middle-ground; shading the higher end, avoiding the pitch-black zero, but not quite hitting the whitest white of a ten. 2) This is alright. The fact that it didn’t make me want to change my life, change my hair, and track down every B-side they had ever recorded is a comfort. Having finished “Repeat After Me,” I didn’t compulsively play it again. I got on with my life. I listened to other things. As my oracle-like friend said, it was nice.
Their single “Barcode” is the sort of thing that you could listen to if you were, say, driving a car. You wouldn’t be so diverted that you’d crash the car. You might even think about other things at the same time. I don’t mean to sound like some Kooks-listening Sunday-driver of a music listener, but this is genuinely enjoyable. The balloon of hyperbole that so often accompanies reviewing an album was gloriously, gratifyingly deflated. With an album like “Repeat After Me,” you can entirely ignore the press-release blurb that claims they sound like Radiohead at their most intense and have their own exhilarating new sound. They don’t really, their songs are just quite pleasant.
However, the press release did hit upon something; The Corrections do sometimes manage to sound quite a lot like other people. The arrangement is Morrissey-esque on “Full Stop,” and they sound as though they have a healthy Radiohead complex on the ridiculously titled opener “This Voice is Not My Voice.” However, the Thom Yorke bent to their music isn’t “intense” at all, but brings to mind a karaoke album serving up versions of hit songs, reminding you of other bands you like, but never quite emulating, let alone surpassing them. This mimicry is combined with the mellow feeling that the band has put forward ideas of what they would like an album to be like without ever flinging themselves in, body and soul, and making an excellent record. The half-hearted “trying to please everybody” approach is all very well and good, but leaves everyone slightly cold.
To use a phrase I have great ambivalence towards, “Repeat After Me” is “a bit vanilla.” This well-produced, well-meaning album is sweet and easy to listen to, but pretty bland. It is nice. And good. But totally, utterly dull.
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