You know when the CD player knocks on to repeat just as the worst track comes on, leaving the same song looming again and again? Well, this album is like a recording of such an incident: uninspiring, "same-old, same-old" and tiresome.After their debut album, Bend To The Breaks, seemed to tiptoe unnoticed through the backstreets of 2006, Glaze Records' Five O'Clock Heroes return with Speak Your Language. Sadly, it seems as though the part-British, part-American band have barely anything original to say; all they seem to do is reiterate and regurgitate the musical styles and sounds of their predecessors.If the off-the-mark imitation of The Police manages to go unnoticed during opening track Judas, the band, very kindly, show the same copycat technique of Stratocaster stuttering in pretty much all of their other songs. It's definitely present in the poor man's Roxanne, Who, which was released as a single last month. One has to wonder if this band's reappearance would have had half as much attention if it wasn't for the media hype gained by having British supermodel Agyness Deyn providing vocals on this track. The model of the moment's high-pitched, airy voice is nothing special, sounding emotionless and as though it's been manipulated to the max during post-production. Mind you, it probably doesn't help that lead singer Antony Ellis insists on groaning out ugly, discordant harmonies over her lines.Every track on Speak Your Language sticks to a basic verse-chorus-verse-chorus pop-rock structure in daring four-four time. This blueprints a stale tediousness where the listener desperately wants to hear something other than a limp-wristed, overly-clean staccato triad [and you can bet your bored mind that it'll be one of the three chords that the band seem to favour], a weak-as-a-wet-lettuce four-note guitar solo or the same lyrics from the intro churned out again in the chorus and the middle eight and the outro. Title track Speak Your Language is a prime example of this monotony- in all seriousness, how many times can someone repeat the phrase "I feel the lights down low/Everyone seems to know" in the space of a few minutes? Of course, it wouldn't be so dismal if the lyrics didn't sound like a recital of any self-deprecating, lust-struck and desperate thirteen-year-old's blog or a game of "fill in the blanks with a rhyming word". If you easily succumb to repetition, then Alice could make it as an in-car sing-along tune. Be warned though; you wouldn't want to be caught listening to the last track, Grab Me, which sounds remarkably like the theme tune to the daytime American telly trash that is The Ricki Lake Show.Perhaps it is the fact that Five O'Clock Heroes seem to be playing it just a little bit too safe that makes the album so insipid. With modulations and key changes more scarce than five pound notes in ATM machines and a severe lack of original style or variation in melody omnipresent, it really is a challenge to find an interesting feature of Speak Your Language. Maybe the out of place flamenco opening to Trust is meant to disguise the mock-Ricky Wilson vocals. It could be that the cliché handclaps and predictably prudent cadences in Everyone Knows It are there to distract from the ripping-off of The Strokes' snappy guitar licks. It's possible that the overly-jolly tempo of New York Chinese Laundry is used to divert attention from how the band list days of the week, just as The Cure did years ago in a much better and more organic manner. Either way, whether or not it is a coincidence that such features have a certain familiarity with the sound of established artists, it seems as though Five O'Clock Heroes have gone a little bit further than just being influenced by the past.Second albums are infamously known to be tricky, but Speak Your Language's total lack of originality and its desperate desire for an ounce of "oomph" mean this could possibly be the worst yet. If it's unique and influential music icons that you want to hear, you'd be better off listening to the stars Five O'Clock Heroes robbed their sounds from than an album by this second rate band. 7%Links Five O'Clock Heroes [myspace]