Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 30/07/07
Label: Columbia Records

For a band named GoodBooks, these boys don't seem to have read many. Take WWI-themed flagship single "Passchendaele", which perfectly encapsulates this band's malaise. As a piece of story-telling, "Passchendaele" couldn't be clunkier. The first line tells you about its protagonist being "born toward the end of the 19th century": now there's an opening to put you to sleep. Later, Max Cooke sings: "He carried English bayonets in an English way / Smoked your cigarettes on Christmas day." It's a couplet that seeks a midpoint between The Farm's "All Together Now" and late-period Suede, but ends up in, well, No Man's Land.

It's commendable, of course, that GoodBooks offer intellectual ambition at a time when such Neanderthals as The Twang can be feted as an exciting new band, but sadly their literary flourishes come off as trite and showy. There's also a fog of tweeness polluting their songs, rendering them peers of Brighton faux-naifs The Maccabees. That connection is easy to make during "Violent Man Lovesong", when Cooke sings: "I could hold back your hair / While you were sick on my new sweatshirt." The Maccabees have a song that wistfully recalls a time when: "I was almost sick on you…" The question is not who's been ripping off who; the question is why more than one band thinks the vomit/romance equation is quirky or interesting?

Sonically, GoodBooks offer bog-standard, four-square indie-pop overlaid with "post-punk" synths. Why the inverted commas? Well, GoodBooks patently lack that very movement's pioneering spirit; that a band's post-punk influence should amount to nicking a few keyboard sounds is, of course, deeply ironic. Plainly, the lofty goals and desire to be different that GoodBooks started out with (this is a band that released a cassette single in 2006) have been beaten out of them by paymasters Columbia Records.

You can see what their label are playing at. Every so often, one or other of those bands trading in wishy-washy stadium-indie anthems breaks big, and which one almost seems random. Generally, though, it's essential to have at least one melody that'll stick in listeners' heads whether they like it or not. GoodBooks, while easy enough on the ear, definitely come up short on this score, to the extent you sometimes wonder whether the A&R man might have mixed them up with Good Shoes.

Their best song, musically, is encumbered with daftly pseudo-intellectual lyrics (yeah: it's "Passchendaele"), while "Good Life Salesmen", an insightful anti-corporate tirade that's their best track lyrically, suffers for having an unmemorable chorus (and for being sponsored by Columbia). Why, you wonder, have GoodBooks chosen to go down the super-commercial route, and how will they survive? More pressingly: how does one hold a bayonet in an English way?

    by Niall O'Keeffe