It’s become something of a rock journalist’s cliché, but the choice of frontman really can make or break a band. No matter how funky your bass-playing, or how fancy your guitar-strumming – the future will rest on whether Joe Public warms to your vocalist. Sometimes a mediocre band can be lifted from the morass of guitar-wielding wannabes on the soaring vocals of one man. Other times, as is the case with Luxembourg, he can be enough to sink you.
It may be unfair to place their failure solely at the feet of David Shah. None of their tunes have the come-back-for-more quality of Bloc Party, say, or Editors, and any vocalist who has to sing ‘`you can stick your BSc from the hallowed hallways of the college of Firth and Fife’ will always struggle for credibility. But the plain fact of the matter is that Shah’s voice manages to irritate once too often, and as he swings from barely controlled baritone to squeaky falsetto you find yourself wishing that his balls would drop someday soon, so we can all go home.
This is a poor Smiths rip-off struggling to stay afloat on a handful of tunes, despite the band’s best attempts at sincere indie worthiness. Joe Public lost interest and left to cadge a fag a long time ago.
