Six Modular Pieces

When you turn it on, it goes round and round, beeps a bit, and makes rhythmic, repetitive droning noises until you shut it off. "I know lads: we'll name the band Appliance!" And that, children, is really how it happened.

On this, their second album, Appliance set fizzy bleeping electronica within a post-rock template, and clearly have the ability to recognise a lovely sound or effective motif when they hear it. The problem is, they don't have any particular idea what to do next. So guitars, basslines and melodies are looped until they lose any meaning or beauty, and what we get is forgettable 'Modernist' soundtracks written by people who have been listening, inattentively, to too much Slint and Lakuna and not enough Stereolab.

It is, however, easy enough to be swept along by the grooves, and I can imagine Appliance's endless forward-motion drive being quite compelling in a live situation. As an album on the other hand, with the possible exception of Slow Roller which could be a not-at-all-bad The For Carnation B-side, Six Modular Pieces is the sound of six ideas - padded out to four to eight minutes each - in search of a songwriter.