The first thing you will notice about Canadians is that they are not actually Canadian.. In fact they are from a land far removed from America’s closest ‘friends’. The home of perhaps the greatest love story ever told, Romeo and Juliet. Fair Verona is where we set our scene. Tenuous link but hey, I’m not sure what else Verona is famous for. Of course it’s full of fine art and architecture, but Italy as a whole is packed with that. Plus, in terms of art and architecture you’d probably go to Venice, Florence or Bologna before you went to Verona. I’ve not actually been to Italy so I can’t comment, but I have it on good authority where to go in Italy if I do.

Anyhow, A Sky With No Stars is Canadians first outing, and whilst it is fairly pretty pop music, dreamy in places, it sounds like a lame version of Scandinavian skewed popsters Mew, or a less grand Grandaddy. Canadians are a more straight forward proposition than either two; regular pop that is nice if you like nice regular pop.

But soon every song starts to sound the same; Americana to the core. If you’re from Verona, surely you could put some home-grown colour into your sound. When I hear a band I want to hear an essence of where they’re from, a slice of themselves. But no! Not a hint of Italian anywhere to be heard; except for frontman Duccio Sibenis slightly irritating Italio-American warbling. Not that all music should conform to geographical barriers, in fact I believe the opposite, but there isn’t anything on this record that stands out. There are good elements; ‘Venus’ is a good pop song. Most of the record is full of half decent pop songs. But their efforts to reach spacey psychedelic heights fail and each song becomes more monotonous. I don’t like to sound harsh as I’m sure they’re a very nice band. But that’s all they are. Nice.