"Quicken The Heart"
(Warp Records)
five / ten
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MAXIMO PARK "Quicken The Heart" (Warp Records)
five / ten |
Recorded and produced by Nick Launay (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Nick Cave, Talking Heads), Maximo Park's latest release Quicken the Heart is the Geordies third release since establishing themselves in Britain's indie-circles with 2005's A Certain Trigger, and sadly does little to inspire.
Sounding like a frenetic mishmash of Arctic Monkeys and The Futureheads, opener "Wraithlike," though infectious, offers no nuances of change from 2007's Our Earthly Pleasures, nor does it grab the listener by the throat in instant impression. Instead, vocalist Paul Smith tells us all "Here's a song that finally you can understand" - what it is we're intended to understand remains unclear, however what soon becomes quite clear is we're in for another tedious traipse down the mundane paths that such bland indie-acts have felt obliged to lay out for us in recent years. Sigh.
Succeeding tracks 'The Penultimate Clinch' and 'The Kids Are Sick Again' offer much the same; the music itself, though not entirely bad, and actually quite good in parts, ultimately gets lost in the general feeling of being here and doing it many times before. However, it's not all bad: with 'A Cloud Of Mystery', we're at last given some idea as to what the bizarre culminated hype was originally about, and could, in all possibility, become a major summer favourite amongst the indie-masses.
Ultimately, though, Maximo Park do little to break-free from the strangle-hold that tightly grips them and the seemingly endless streams of mediocre indie-acts that have risen to the fore in recent years.
Mark Kelleher
www.myspace.com/maximopark
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