As someone who is not ashamed to confess to daily gazing with adoration at a poster of a leather clad Justin Young et al, it pains me to say it. It really does. But The Vaccines’ eagerly anticipated follow-up album Come of Age is shit. Admittedly not a purge-it-from-your-Spotify shitness, but suffice to say, it’s not great.
Inevitably it was going to be some feat to live up to the band’s chart-smashing 2011 debut What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? but after Come of Age we’re going to expect a hell of lot less from this west London indie foursome. The riotous vocals and uproariously catchy harmonies in ‘If You Wanna’ and ‘Wreckin’ Bar (Ra-Ra-Ra)’, with their evocation of teenage rebellion and rockabilly tumult are long gone. Because the Vaccines have grown up you see; They’ve ‘Come of Age’. Yeah deep.
In ‘Teenage Icon’, Young bemoans ‘I’m no teenage icon…I’m nobody’s hero’. Well, quite. The lowest point though, comes from ‘Weirdo’ with its doleful refrain ‘I don’t want to let it go/ You know I’m not a weirdo’, which after three minutes contrives to make one yearn for the musical equivalent of a restraining order. Always in danger of sounding like a pastiche of a middle-class indie boy band, The Vaccines’ flirtation with parody was a strong component in their meteoric and well deserved rise to official harbingers of cool. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Young declared confidently ‘It scares me how easy I find songwriting’. Yeah? Well this really isn’t a surprise with lyrics such as ‘I’m so self-obsessed/I don’t really care about anyone else when I haven’t got my own life figured out’.
But that’s not to say glimmers of the band we know and esteem are uniformly absent. The dark, louche crooning in ‘I wish I was a Girl’ sounds gloriously Black Keys-ian while ‘Change of Heart’ has an anthemic, endorphin-pumping velocity reminiscent of ‘Norgaard’. But the gothic-tinged ‘Ghost Town’ with it’s sharp staccato beat and surging hook-lines is the glistening gem in this generally mediocre album.
Ultimately while Come of Age might signify a volte-face album for The Vaccines, it lacks the coherency and dynamism of their debut. The band’s characteristic chutzpah is still there, albeit underneath the affectation, but the overall effect feels hubristic and static. The Vaccines, Come of Age? Not likely.
THREE STARS
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