Difficult to imagine that The Vines began their career in the dancey, fruity, stripey enclaves of cult rave independent, XL Recordings when their ‘Factory’ seven-incher became NME’s ‘Single of the Week’. Since then, it’s been a bit of a mixed bag, the band pioneering 2002’s garage-rock revival with the massively influential, ‘Highly Evolved’ and then shooting off into a slipstream of the press’s own relentless hype. Next was the band’s foray into psychedelic, Paisley pop – ‘Winning Days’ – a rather elaborate and grandiose wrong-footer immediately seized by critics as an excuse to cut off their life-support and see how the Aussies fared without the gross hype they’d been reckless enough to heap upon them in the first place. Inevitably, the abrupt change in pace gave the impression of band pissing around in a studio and losing momentum, which wasn’t exactly the case.
As a consequence of the band’s premature fall from glory, Craig Nicholls hit the self-destruct button, assaulting a reporter, barred from giving interviews and eventually walking off stage in Sydney. And somewhere amongst all this he was diagnosed with Aspergers, a mild form of autism, but clearly responsible for his increasingly erratic behaviour.
So what’s changed in all that time? Well not a great deal. The band have moved from Heavenly to Cooking Vinyl here in the UK but the basic principle is just the same: screaming, sugar-fuelled hardcore tamed by the occasional mellow ballad. Fans of the band could probably predict the mood to within an inch of Nicholl’s furious tangents. ‘Mangert’ hard – ‘A.S III’ soft (and floaty), ‘He’s A Rocker’ hard, ‘Orange Amber’ soft (but jangly) and so it goes on in a less than surprising fashion.
Of course, you might say such a calculated framework is perhaps the only thing likely to channel the frontman’s inattentive and crazy departures, but the rather stodgy and peakless way its all meted out, means it very often collapses under the weight of its own unremarkable-ness. Even the fuzz-based infections of current single, ‘He’s A Rocker’ fails to the impact in quite the same way that ‘Ride’ did back in 2004. ‘Jamolas’ brief trajectory inspires, but it’s all over in under a minute, cruelly pushed aside by even more desultory balladeering. And whilst tracks like, ‘True As The Night’ are not unpleasant, the trite, hackneyed way in which Nicholls characterises his feelings, undermines any headway he makes with a melody. Elsewhere, the band merely repeats the shuffly, agit-pop glory of their earlier songs like ‘Don’t Listen To The Radio’.
And if it all sounds bored and rather tired then that’s just the way it is. Like it, or lump it.
Produced by Rob Schnapf.
‘MELODIA’ – RELEASED 06.10.08