The Futureheads
The Futureheads

THE REVIEW

The Futureheads are yet another new musical product that harks back to past styles and is immediately hyped and presented as the Next Big Thing. Never before has the gap between the group's premises and promises and reality been so wide.
The attempt to strip down and simplify the songs is so taken to the extreme that what remains compositionally is really very little.

The riffs are direct, immediate, but they are so flat and banal that they become tiring after just a few seconds. The attempt to constantly use vocal melodic lines that are over-the-top is also problematic, as if they were parodies of songs rather than serious attempts at writing music.
There's nothing wrong with a carefree and irreverent attitude, but here the compositional minimalism seems to be caused more by our group's lack of talent than by a real ability to possess/replicate/desecrate the models. In short, the bignamistic tendency, that tendency which leads bands in recent years to take models from the past and make a brief summary for the use and consumption of people who are unwilling to study, is taken to truly excessive levels. Every song inevitably has the same tempo, the same attack and is built in the same, identical, tedious manner.

This is a band with only one trick to show, but even that's old and stale.
The musical references are those obligatory during this period: Punk, Post-Punk. In short, brief and angular riffs + singing. Speed. Brevity.
Except here the songs are never too brief. Skip.