Stereophonics’ meat’n’potatoes Brit-rock is very easy to knock. So here goes. No, only kidding. Well, sort of kidding. The Welsh band were a fixture of the charts from the late Nineties until relatively recently. Initially punted hard as the first signing to Richard Branson’s V2 label, they rode out the arse end of Brit-pop and, in “Have a Nice Day”, made one of those songs that's irritatingly purpose built for ads and TV montages. Four years since parting ways with V2 after an underperforming album, they appear with the follow-up, their eighth, which occasionally spikes their usual lumpen Oasis-meets-The Faces sound with something a bit more interesting.
On the positive side, then, there’s “Catacombs”, which, albeit in a rather cleaned up way, boasts a thuggish, mantric riff with more than a smidgeon of Iggy Pop's golden years about it. It’s the album’s head-banging highlight. The epic “In A Moment” rolls along on breakbeats, sniffing tunefully around electro-rock territory that the likes of Death In Vegas and U.N.K.L.E. once made their own. “Violins and Tambourines”, a twangy slowie that grows into a pulsing Motorik drone could have been a contender too but singer Kelly Jones’ mid-Atlantic drawl knackers it.
That’s it. The rest is old-fashioned, earnest, stadium-intended dad-rock, from the tired Rod Stewart-ing of the title track to the Stones-ish blues of “Been Caught Cheating” (surely that should be “Cheatin’” for the full cod-Seventies effect?). There’s no denying Jones can write a hooky song, although his lyrics come apart, from time to time (Try this: “It was a cold September before the Indian summer/That’s the thing I remember when she gave me her number”). This is a band who once wrote a song called “Mr Writer” about music journos sneering at them and picking their music apart, so they'd undoubtedly find this review entirely predictable. Then again, with a couple of exceptions, so is their latest album.
Watch the video for "Indian Summer"