This is bound to be praised to the hilt as the Next Big Thing, but rock outfit At The Drive In have only one thing going in their favour - the absence of competition. It's so close to being something beautiful, something to cling on to in these aurally barren times, but it's just so not quite.
ATDI do touch on greatness briefly. 'Invalid Litter Dept' is a chaotic jumble of melodic snarls and rage-ridden poetry but there's a whiff of something nasty in between the beat poetry verses, as with the rest of this, their debut on the Beastie's Grand Royal label.
That whiff, when you get down to it, positively reeks of Slipknot and the like, so it's no surprise to find that Ross Robinson (Slipknot, Amen, Korn) had a hand in producing this amalgam of art-noise and nu-metal.
But somehow, despite the dubious rock connections, ATDI are being bundled in with the likes of And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead... and Queens Of The Stone Age, but ATDI just aren't all that convincing as a member of the movement.
That they have been billed between the Beastie's themselves and Rage Against The Machine points at where they are coming from and it ain't art-noise.
Remember kids, sometimes it's better to do without than make do.
