Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 06/11/06
Label: Heavenly

This is a strange one. Four or five songs into the new Magic Numbers' album and you're thinking: "Great! It's all a bit déjà vu, but this is sprinkled with the same platinum-selling formula as their eponymous first. I love it." Or words to that affect. Crow-barred to the limit with breezy jingly melodies and underpinned by that overwhelming sense of love and loss in Romeo Stodart's yearning voice, the clunkily-titled "Those The Brokes" feels as familiar and welcome as a mother's hug.

Bizarre then, that an hour or so later and you're feeling quite the opposite. That, having trudged along an endless road that led eventually to nowhere, you're apparently miles from home and unsure whether you'd ever want to repeat the experience. Anyone who bought the second Thrills album, the much maligned "Let's Bottle Bohemia", will understand exactly what this means: in a rush to sustain career momentum, another retro-facing '60s-influenced band has lost the musical plot.

Trying to prove their own personality but weighed down by their influences, the thread has gone seriously awry. In the case of "Those The Brokes", the first signifier of this diagnosis is the song titles themselves. Any tracklisting including the likes of "Slow Down (The Way It Goes)", "Boy", "Carl's Song" and "All I See" smacks of works-in-progress; while calling your opening track "This Is A Song", and closing the album with another called "Goodnight" hardly hints at innovation overdrive.

It's not that this is a particularly bad album, just a slightly half-baked one. The handful of strong points (bouncy new single "Take A Chance", the dreamy, almost My Bloody Valentine edge to "You Never Had It", the hurtling pop thrill of "Runnin' Out", the fact that Angela Gannon takes more lead vocals) are outweighed by a feeling of unrealized fuzziness. The actual running order, which places a run of five painstakingly slow numbers at the album's centre, does little to help this.

Two of these ("Take Me Or Leave Me" and "Boy") employ the services of famed Nick Drake arranger Robert Kirby. Such manoeuvrings, which sound wonderful on paper and are supposed to evoke the grandeur of truly great albums, often fall flat, and so it proves here. While "Take Me Or Leave Me" is the pick of the ballads, the overall effect is like watching four characters hijack the party stereo and turn everyone's night into a bit of a bummer.

Ultimately, "Those The Brokes" is an archetypal "difficult" second album. Lopping off about twenty minutes would have improved things no end, but mostly it needs focus - focus that would probably have come with time. The Magic Numbers are still a band with huge potential and capable of great things, but this is not their finest hour. Fans wanting another "Forever Lost" or "Hymn To Her" would be better off waiting for album number three.

    by Adam Webb