Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 03/04/06
Label: EMI

Hype. It's a word routinely misapplied to bands that understandably get the press a bit frisky, like Arctic Monkeys and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It's a conversational staple for people who listen to Embrace, watch "Top Gear" and fear anything new or exciting or different. To hear the phrase "It's all a big hype, innit?" is to scan the room for someone else to talk to.

Once in a while, though, a band is thrust to a level of prominence so strikingly ill-deserved that only the word hype will do. The Vines are a classic - nay, the classic - case in point. After the fragile talents of Craig Nicholls sparked an industry feeding frenzy in 2001, The Vines found themselves signed to Capitol Records, holed up in a top LA recording studio with a rotating cast of producers, and plainly out of their depth.

Admittedly, debut album "Highly Evolved" was a reasonably tuneful affair, but it proved a sugar rush: after a couple of listens it made a beeline for the very back of your collection, never to be heard from again. By the time the water-treading "Winning Days" was rushed out in 2004, the music was inaudible above gossip concerning Nicholls' on - and offstage temper tantrums. Eventually, he was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and taken off the road.

"Vision Valley" represents The Vines' attempt at a comeback, and it's an utter failure. Like "Highly Evolved", it flits between abrasive grunge ("Gross Out", "Anysound") and dreamy pop psychedelia ("Candy Daze", the title track), but it comes off as a faint facsimile of the earlier record, itself a faint facsimile of Nirvana and The Kinks (Nicholls' main obsessions, alongside Muse and forgotten shoegazers Swervedriver).

Lyrically, "Vision Valley" offers little beyond phoned-in adolescent carping, much of it completely unintelligible. Excepting "Dope Train" - which warns eloquently of the perils of excessive pot-smoking ("You're forever dreamin' / And forever bored") - genuine insight is at a premium. You want poetry? Try this: "People are full of hurt / And so are all their friends." You want polemic? One track exhorts us not to listen to the radio. You want wordplay? Well, one song is titled "Fuk Yeh"; another, "Futuretarded". See what he did there?

A knack for woozy melodies is one weapon at Nicholls' disposal; but here they're fatally undermined both by his petulant vocal style and by the rickety, paper-thin production. It's been suggested that, being excessively reliant on ProTools software, The Vines represent a "digital guess" at what a rock band should sound like. There's plenty here to support that claim. By the time the dreamy coda of "Spaceship" concludes the album with its only geniune highlight, you've already reached your own conclusion: well, it's all a big hype, innit?

    by Niall O'Keeffe