The Beat Surrender

I know from time to time we happen to fall a little bit behind on keeping up with our reviews here at The Beat Surrender, however the delay in reviewing this one is very much planned.

At the time of this coming out at the end of January I read a lot of reviews and it was fair to say that most of them were giving the album maximum marks, be it out of five or ten. Fair enough, everyone is entitled to his or her opinion and maybe I’m ‘wrong’ with mine, but it really did seem like overkill. This was compounded when that week I saw a list of the top 100 British albums in the NME…. despite being only a week old Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not came in at number 5.

In my opinion you need to give an album a fair chance, that means that if you don’t like it on first listen you give it three or four spins before coming to a conclusion and reviewing it. Likewise if you know an album has a lot of hype around it, it’s sometimes easier to let the dust settle before giving it a review, that way you reflect more on the albums qualities than you do on the hyperbole surrounding the release, which no matter how good a reviewer you are is still going to effect you. So here we are nearly two months down the line and it’s now time for me to finalise where I stand on the fastest selling British debut album ever.

As meteoric rises go I can think of few guitar bands from the UK who have enjoyed such a climb in the last thirty years. Two singles (proper) and two number ones, in like a bullet. Sell out tours and now it seems they are cracking America without even trying too hard (the album is in the top twenty five and they’ve only just headed over there…. watch it climb). The question is though, is the album good enough to warrant that level of success or is it simply a case of ‘the hype win-eth over’?

I’m gonna start by saying that I really do like this band a lot, Yorkshire lads singing in Yorkshire accents, clever and often very funny lyrics that you can really associate with and with a tune that has you bouncing around like an idiot with a big smile on your face. However, it doesn’t even come close to full marks for me. Eight out of ten is a damn good score, but I think the albums main flaws lay in the fact that a large percentage of the songs on this album are very similar. Occasionally the lyrics manage to hide the fact that musically it isn’t the most original, however even they can’t cover for a track like Perhaps Vampires Is A Bit Strong But..

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