Before we start, let it be known that Applicants is the worst name for a band ever - try typing it into Google and you'll get my drift. Eventually I managed to track the little blighters down on mySpazz. I imagine their PR company adore them...So, the elusive Applicants. Two guys, one girl, from Wolverhampton via Singapore, who churn out a mixture of sounds, ideas, samples, and occasionally a bit of coherent music. Life in the Bus Lane is a melting pot of Ash's 1977, Incubus' S.C.I.E.N.C.E. and a wee bit of northern swagger for good measure. (That'll be the Wolverhampton bit, then.)The result is a group of bolstering, rollicking tunes that almost sound like a patchwork of songs all stitched together in a rather haphazard fashion. A bit like my own sewing skills really.‘He's A Man', track three, is the first ‘proper' track on the album, as in it follows the verse-chorus-verse structure, although it does descend into bleeps and computer games ditties at one point. Other than that it's a rather sub-standard number that's centred around one meagre riff and the lyrics ‘he's a man'. I would beg to differ.It seems to me that Applicants have realised that their song writing talents aren't quite making the grade, and so have slipped in every odd bell/whistle/zing/zap/pow/sound bite they could get their hands on and hoped we'd be distracted and go ‘ooh isn't it quirky? A bit like them Ting Tings'. Well judging from their mySpace it seems, indeed, that some people have been distracted. The majority of music listeners will not be fooled though.‘Pigbag' is an absolute shambles and is the musical equivalent of a sentence missing every other word. It sounds like all of the members of the band decided to simply do their own thing. Luckily it's less than a minute long, stopping just before the brain gives up and moves out.‘Pocket Dictionary' shows a slight bit of promise with a danceable, surfy chorus, American college-band feel, but Applicants couldn't resist shoving in some unnecessary nasty shouting and those incredible irritating computer sounds. ‘Gameshow', which follows, is also far more listenable, with an up-beat, airy feel to it, and an enjoyable falsetto. Indeed from here on in the album starts to pick up a bit, with ‘Enjoy your Pizza', a relaxed and light-hearted ska sing-a-long, with some nice guitar skills and a far better use of odd noises - a munch right at the end of the track.So start at track seven and don't look back and there's some indie-pop gems, albeit with rather bizarre subject matters up for consumption. Listen to anything earlier on in Life in the Bus Lane and it becomes perfectly clear why the band don't want to be found. 40%Links Applicants [myspace]