Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 26/10/09
Label: Columbia

Miike Snow seem to possess a kind of otherworldly pop intellect, the kind shared by the likes of Simon Cowell and whoever it was that patented the Kanye West shades. Their mothers must have read them "The Pop Bible" each night before bedtime or at least played a lot of Elton John in the car.

Asides from each member spending the last decade supplying major labels with tunes (Swedish third of Miike Snow, Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg, wrote Britney's "Toxic", singer Andrew Wyatt produced the new Daniel Merriweather album alongside Mark Ronson), the band ticked just about every box marked 'authentic, modern pop prospect' before releasing this debut. First came a steady trickle of remixes, including a particularly good snez-tronic take on Passion Pit's "The Reeling", released upon the blogsphere via name-checkable new media outlets like Rcrdlbl.com.

Then, as if the wackily misspelled yet memorable name and that rabbit-with-antlers logo hadn't sealed the deal, with singles "Animal" and "Black And Blue", they managed to nail together chic indie-electro and Chris Martin-brand piano rock, sanding down the edges with an instantly hum-able falsetto vocal. Sadly for the album, these are by far and away its best tracks and, in line with most mainstream pop releases, "Miike Snow" stretches itself a little thin, propped-up with formulaic, by numbers songs in-between its hits. As with cheap bacon, once the filler has melted away, the listener experiences something of a negative epiphany that tarnishes the whole experience.

The singles, along with digital release "A Horse Is Not A Home" and "Song For No One" (in which the summery, tuneful element of Animal Collective is skimmed-off and spun into four minutes), exude, like a Hoxton-gastropub, a sense of (almost) urban-cool. The album, however, comes across as rather grimly suburban, with dreary, pitch-control flailing ballad "Silvia" and Toploader-recalling "Burial" feeling like pointless additions.

Almost all the music on here shows at least small signs of the superior songwriting chops they demonstrate on the bewitching, John Lennon-esque closer, "Faker". They let themselves down though with regular lapses in taste and ventures into the random-dictionary-page school of lyric-writing. "Plastic Jungle" sounds as though it was turned down by Girls Aloud and "Sans Soleil" belongs squarely in Mr G's musical from "Summer Heights High" (lyric sample: "How can we expect to build a boat / With seagulls running everything?/ Ooooohh, Aaahhh / Make it hard").

It's refreshing to hear pop's behind-the-scenes talents doing it for themselves, but this would have been a lot more interesting if they'd prioritised imagination over dogged method.

    by Edgar Smith