The Overtones style themselves as a ‘doo-wop boy band’. Style is the right word. Everything feels very polished and slick. Their album cover shows the five of them striding around in various natty suits. Sadly, their music is nowhere near as stylish or even as substantial as their dress sense.
You’d think it’d be hard to get angry about The Overtones, an almost aggressively inoffensive band – all smiles, “bob-shoo-waddy-waddy” backing vocals and crooning. You’d think so.
Unfortunately you’d be wrong. There’s only so much time that you can spend in their company before you get the urge to wash out your ears with bleach in order to dissolve the layer of sugar that accumulates on your eardrum. That period of time barely outlasts the first track.
These are some of the most annoying people in the music business. They obviously think that they’re doing the world a service by bringing back doo-wop (a genre that was annoying to begin with). All they’re actually doing is giving us more background noise. There’s just no edge to this stuff.
The closest they get to any kind of feeling is when rolling their ‘r’s on ‘Reet Petite’, and that feeling is simply the feeling of being out of place. These people deserve to be boringly average auditionees on the spin-off ‘Xtra’ show of some primetime talent contest, not people who, for some unknown reason, have a record deal. It makes you wonder how many other talented but unrecognised people could have made albums if the plastic and paper that went into creating each copy of Higher hadn’t been so needlessly wasted.
I guess the theory is that this is the sort of music that you could ‘enjoy’ alongside your gran. But your gran would probably fucking hate it too, because your gran has brilliant music taste compared to the cretins who signed these grinning, suit-bound twats.
