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Rating: The band of the red-maned Ginger has undergone a myriad of line-up changes over the years since it was founded in the now distant 1990.
In it have passed, sometimes only for the time of some live shows, people from Dogs D'Amour, Honeycrack, and even a pre-Strapping Young Lad Devin Townsend.
In this exact mid-career album, we find the return to the base of original guitarist C.J. and drummer Stidi.
The three went to an English village of 3000 souls (Alford in Lincolnshire), repeatedly raided the local liquor store to the point of later dedicating the album to its owner (found dead from a heart attack one morning by his family), and recorded eleven songs made of that usual rock sometimes raw and metallic, sometimes chart-topping typical of Ginger's writing.
For a while, things hold up too, thanks to some "almost" hits like "Only Love" and "One Love, One Life, One Girl" and a few splinters in the eyes like "Nexus Icon", but, once the Beatles-like vein on one side and the aggressive and martial one on the other (see "Vanilla Radio") is soon exhausted, halfway through the album it forms a long series of flat, indistinguishable, and unnecessarily catchy tracks.
It feels like listening to the Blink 182 of Albion in their worst form, and this is certainly not something good and right for animals like the Wildhearts who have made madness, rock, and transgression the brand of their career.
But alas... an EP would have sufficed, and the judgment, as often happens for albums that succeed halfway, would have been different.
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