You Me At Six - 'Jealous Minds Think Alike'
Short review: if you like Forever The Sickest Kids, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and Kids In Glass Houses, you'll probably also like this almost unconditionally.
Long review, for everyone else: actually this sounds a little bit like Idlewild in places.
I'm joking, of course, there's more to it than that and anyway, I really like Kids In Glass Houses and don't really like this all that much. This is one of those songs that claims, with its huge hairy guitars and slightly shouty vocals to ROCK REALLY HARD and probably fans of it go completely mental to it at gigs. The actual sum of its parts, however, is nothing like as punk as I think it probably wants to be.
That doesn't make the song wholly unpleasant, of course, it's just a case of refiling this under 'radio rock in the same vein as The Calling' rather than 'OMG RAWK.'
It's inoffensive, certainly; his voice isn't unpleasantly whiny and the instrumental parts are more than serviceable, however, it doesn't really go further than that. There's a lack of either a bonkers pop melody to push it over into 'awesome' territory or a serious amount of aggression to also, err, push it over into 'awesome' territory. It's one of those songs that walks a line between 'rubbish' and 'good' so coordinatedly that it's hard to do anything other than sigh a bit at it.
I know the band have legions of faithful fans who probably find the song extremely exciting but for the rest of us, this is kind of a neither-here-nor-there record. It ticks all the theoretical boxes for being a reasonably good Taking Back Sunday ripoff but doesn't totally pull it off, leaving me with not a lot to think about it other than the fact it sounds a lot like a lot of other bands only less so.
Still, that doesn't make it BAD, even if it's slightly too keen to worship at the throne of US emo and so I can't really give it a harsh mark in good conscience, just not a particularly great one, either.
Download: Out now
CD Released: September 29th
(Hazel Robinson)
Comment number 1.
At 25th Sep 2008, XxlivsxX wrote:I'm not a particular fan of these, although I have heard some of their other stuff. And I have to admit, of the other 3 songs that they've sort of released, this is the poorest. Having said that, I've found it's grown on me a bit, as I think it's one of those where you need to familiarise yourself with it, as the melody is not immediately obvious. Fair rating I would say.
Complain about this comment (Comment number 1)