You’ll know The Twang, if only because we’ve constantly been told to expect great things of them. January saw the Birmingham outfit feature prominently in the BBC tastemakers’ poll and get the nod from NME as this year’s great white hope. So far so good, yet six months is a long time in music and thus their debut album emerges needing to stand on its own two feet.
In those terms, it isn’t really all that. It would seem that epic first single ‘Wide Awake’ sold us a bit of a dummy. It still sounds fantastic here, a distillation of the swagger of the Roses and the Mondays with the widescreen vision of the best of U2, the problem being that it sets a standard that the rest of the album rarely matches.
When they get it right (‘Either Way’, ‘Loosely Dancing’, ‘Two Lovers’) they achieve the kind of lying in the gutter/staring at the stars poetic vision that has typified Mike Skinner’s best work. These moments are in the minority though, too often replaced by a boorish, lads on the town vibe that doesn’t suit them. All told, it’s an OK debut but not what we were promised and one that, come December, may find the scribes who made such lofty predictions feeling slightly sheepish.