If at first you don't succeed pick yourself up and try again, but if that doesn't happen, sod off to the states for a year. It's a well traveled road that BB Mak have found themselves on, and one that has helped them already shift the sort of units UK pop bands can only dream of. So, coming back here (baby) and trying similar should be a piece of piss, or at least you'd think so, wouldn't you?
Unfortunately for the Mak, their debut album 'Sooner Or Later' is a bit of a blander. Recent hits 'Back Here' and 'Still On Your Side' (although in truth, they've been releasing these as far back as mid 1999) stand out, as for the rest there's very little in these 14 tracks to get excited about (except perhaps the vaguely windswept mooder 'Ghost Of You And Me') or unless you still actually mourn Let Loose or Danny Wilson that is.
And whilst it's a noble thing that the not-entirely-ugly Mak are doing here - instruments, writing own songs, all that 'proper' stuff - it's not much fun to listen to, which is a shame. The majority of tracks here lock into a middle aged MOR-ness, with not even a space noise to pepper up the strummy strum of 'being real'. Tracks like 'Unpredictable', 'I'm Not In Love' and 'Love On The Outside' have a bad sub-Atlantic feel, which over-clubs you with melody and leaves you feeling a bit ill.
BB Mak may be itching to get on with their second album now, especially as they've been flogging a variation of this for the last year or so, and whilst tunes are all present and correct, a little bit of voyaging into slightly more exciting musical forms, or at least subtracting a smidgeon of the wall-to-wall harmony may help them in the future. Still, they're better than A1, not that that's a hard thing to achieve.
