I believe you can tell a lot about a band by who they choose as their top friends on myspace (I know, I’m so 2006). It’s a chance to show the world, or at least the tiny minority who will ever listen to your music, which other artists you are grateful to, whom you are trying to emulate and whom you admire. So when I scroll down the myspace page of Straight Lines, a noise pop-cum-punk band from Wales, who are supporting The Automatic when they play the Oxford O2 academy this March, and find that the only ‘Friends’ they recognise are four different fan groups for themselves, I have to ask ‘on what is this arrogance founded?’
In listening to their debut album Persistence in This Game the answer is, broadly speaking, not a lot. One can sum up this band by listening to ‘Versus The Allegiance’, the first track and first single off their first album. It’s hook and harmony heavy noise pop, that at its best (the first 30 seconds of second track ‘Loose Change’) sounds like a watered down Los Campesinos and at its worst (when lead singer Tom Jenkins quivering vocals saw through the rest of the album) like an angry and even less charming Bombay Bicycle Club.
It’s obvious that this band have a formula for writing songs. Open with hard guitar and loud drums (eerily similar to the first five seconds of ‘One Arm Scissor’ by At The Drive-In), squawk platitudes for three minutes, such as ‘I’ve got places to go/I’ve got people to see’, the less than catchy refrain of ‘All my friends have joined the army’, then finish off the third act with some toneless shouting. I guess this might have added some intrigue to the music, if it didn’t become so predictable in its repetition.
Two stars
