Airborne Toxic Event

Every year certain albums are held aloft as the ‘sound of the summer’, and every year we enjoy said albums through May to September and then completely forget they existed. There are a few exceptions, like Jollification by Lightning Seeds, which have stayed lodged somewhere in our consciousness, but otherwise ‘summer albums’ are by and large forgettable trash.

Hence I wasn’t holding out too much hope for the self-titled debut of The Airborne Toxic Event, released just in time for everyone’s post-exam euphoria. They’re a five-piece from Los Angeles who appear to suffer from some kind of collective inferiority complex. They possess unlimited ambitions – comparing themselves to U2 and The Strokes – but show little in the way of ability with which to achieve them.

If you need proof of this, just check out the opening track. ‘Wishing Well’ may open with the shimmering keyboards from Enya’s ‘Caribbean Blue’, but it very soon descends into every last indie cliché. From the unnecessary echo and distortion on the guitar to the monotonous thumps on the bass drum (always one beat per bar), there’s nothing new going on. Add in a vocalist trying to impersonate Bruce Springsteen after a few drinks and you have the very definition of an average opener.

‘Papillon’ is just as forgettable but a lot more enjoyable. Mikel Jollett ditches the drunken Bruce Springsteen in favour of a more macho Robert Smith, with his voice becoming deeper and his manner more believable. The song is much punchier, knowing what it has to do and how long to do it for. ‘Gasoline’, meanwhile, is unremarkable for those of us who don’t worship The Strokes. It’s a meat-and-potatoes rock song with a decent riff, a good time signature, an average set of lyrics and nothing else in its favour.

Having moderately bored us up to now, the album takes an indecisive twist with ‘Happiness Is Overrated’. The title sounds like an off-cut from the last Frank Turner album, Love Ire & Song, but musically it’s the complete opposite. Where Turner is rowdy and fast-paced to the point of being obnoxious, this is a conglomeration of all that is passable and middle-of-the-road. After a stillborn hard rock intro, Jollett croons over long guitar chords before the track morphs into something resembling ‘Bite Hard’ from Tonight: Franz Ferdinand.

This track demonstrates the central problem with this album. The band just don’t know what they want to sound like, and until they make up their minds, they seem content to rip off everyone else who did it first and did it better. To this end, we have the next two tracks. ‘Does This Mean You’re Moving On?’ has the virtue of a short running time; at only 2 minutes long, it’s only boring, rather than boring-as-hell. ‘This Is Nowhere’ is a poor rip-off of the Editors’ first album, except that Daren Taylor’s drumming is inferior and the synthesisers are painfully underused.

It’s only on the second single, ‘Sometime Around Midnight’, that we get something even vaguely interesting. First, there’s the intro, packed with striking violins which bring a sense of grandeur and elegance lacking in a lot of modern indie. But don’t think for a minute that this is just a poor man’s ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’. This gradually rises and rises, starting from a U2-ish base of jangly guitars but then gradually blossoming into a full-blown rock song. It’s like a cross between Arcade Fire’s ‘No Cars Go’ and LCD Soundsystem’s ‘All My Friends’.

The following tracks, however, fail to live up to such an anthem. ‘Something New’ is the musical equivalent of Orlando Bloom: boring, bland, and about as involving as a wet fish. ‘Missy’ is the sort of song designed to only be heard on adverts for mobile phones; like every single song by Noah and the Whale, it’s trying too hard to sound kooky and esoteric, and thus comes across as completely ordinary and dull. ‘Innocence’ is six minutes of tedium, possessing a decent beat but nothing else that is remotely memorable. And of the three bonus tracks, ‘The Winning Side’ is passable, ‘This Losing’ is humdrum, and ‘The Girls In Their Summer Dresses’ is just plain dull.

If there’s one album that TATE’s debut resembles, it’s Around The Sun by R.E.M. That possessed a great single, ‘Wanderlust’, but its other tracks were largely indistinguishable, turning the album into an amorphous mess with no real purpose or direction. TATE’s debut effort is exactly that, an amorphous collection of riffs recycled from better bands, both past and present, with no real ideas of how to use them or create something new in the process. As a ‘summer album’ it’s fine, with some good and entertaining singles, but I have doubts as to whether, come September, we shall remember TATE at all.