Opening track ‘Let The Good Times Come My Way’ can be succinctly described as what you’d get if you had Tom Chaplin from Keane fronting The Departure. It’s pretty easy to imagine and equally easy to feel fairly indifferent about. From there onwards, though, Some Velvet Morning’s debut album gets thankfully more interesting.
On the second track they’re some kind of foot-stomping seventies rock posers, on the third they take a very Paranoid Android-like guitar hook and wrap it up in something moody yet adamantly melodic. Every track seems to be built around a different combination of guitar band influences from the past thirty years or so. On ‘Pretty Girl’ and ‘Propaganda’ there are hints of The Police, and it’s at these moments that Some Velvet Morning sound most comfortable and confident.
They’ve done something good, and in a climate of boring debuts from one trick pony guitar bands have released a debut that demonstrates loads of different tricks. They even do some piano blues on the closing track. The trouble is, for every one of their tricks there are already a good few bands doing that trick better.
