Yahoo! Music Review

Released on 14/05/07
Label: Fiction Records

The best song on The Maccabees' debut album carries the refrain, "Latchmere's got a wave machine", referencing a leisure centre in South London. How you react to this will essentially determine whether this is the band for you. Either you'll be charmed by the prevailing sense of childish wonder, or you'll ask: what the hell's up with these guys? Are they 12?

If "Colour It In" were any more twee, it would be wearing a patterned cardigan and listening to Belle & Sebastian while drinking sugary tea and reminiscing about '80s kids TV programmes. There's a song here titled "Lego" which sets the Green Cross Code to music; another labours under the title "Toothpaste Kisses". In terms of its lyrics, it's a relentlessly trivial record, which might not matter if singer Orlando Weeks didn't take himself so seriously.

He sings lines like "Swimming, swimming, swimming / Just stay in your lanes" and "Take me down to light the box / And play Super Scalectrix" as if they were existential profundities that will echo down the ages. Worse, he sings them in a quivering, anguished bleat that's equal parts Morrissey and Larry The Lamb. It's tolerable in small doses, but over the course of even a 30 minute LP it gets annoying.

Musically, meanwhile, The Maccabees trade in scuffed, superficially angst-ridden indie-pop that's reminiscent of those second-wave Britpop bands that rolled off major label production lines in 1997: tiresomely retro bands whose mediocrity can be summed up with a mention of the name Gene. To put it in still more contemporary terms, The Maccabees frequently sound exactly like The Departure, Parlophone signings whose mix of grey '80s indie and whiny vocals met with universal indifference a couple of years back, which can't bode well for The Maccabees' commercial prospects, unless there are still untapped markets for Smiths retreads with inane lyrics.

That The Maccabees have based themselves in Brighton is perhaps revealing. For all its charm, Brighton's a town where it is deemed acceptable to write epic songs about mobile phones. It's a town where one can live one's entire life as if it were an ironic art-student prank. It's a town where, presumably, a band with songs about "leopard-print (sheets) and matching velvet duvets" can feel right at home. Even there, though, a logical conundrum must be faced: you can do the innocent-kids-at-play routine or you can do the tortured-souls routine. But you can't do both.

    by Niall O'Keeffe