Album Review: Underachiever & The Letdowns, Adventures In Disappointment

The brainchild of Tony McLoughlin, former member of The Young Folk and sometime mandolin player with Junior Brother, Underachiever & The Letdowns are the finest purveyors of pristine punk and zany pop that you’ve never heard.

Album opener ‘Jacket’ comes on like Amyl And The Sniffers, if they came from Ballyfermot instead of Melbourne, with a rhythm as infectious as influenza, the catchiest bassline this side of a Tarantino soundtrack, and the most hilarious diatribe about losing an item of clothing since the Sultans Of Ping mislaid their geansaí.

‘Snackbox’ comes from the same songbook, a surfer-punk ode to deep fried chicken and chips, delivered in a delicious Dublin brogue – think the Fontaines jamming with Damo Dempsey.

The epic ‘Children Of The Night’ is a tongue-in-cheek look at the after-dark denizens of Dublin city, via Francis Ford Coppola’s campy take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. ‘Sydney Tony’ is all dramatic eastern flourishes and tremolo guitar licks, tongue firmly in cheek, like The Pogues’ ‘Summer In Siam’ shot through with Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah’.

Elsewhere, there’s the Ghostbusters-inspired ‘Dana Zul’, the Velvets-esque slacker-rock of ‘Angry Banger’, the greedy consumerism of ‘Can’, and the hardcore ‘Scampi Pints’, as the ironically monikered Underachiever & The Letdowns deliver an album that’s far greater than the sum of its parts.

7.5/10