What are we to do with bands like High Above The Storm? The London quartet’s debut record, made with undeniable musicianship and sparkling production values, full of grand gestures and emotive vocal prowess, contemplative lows and explosive highs, is”¦ quite dull listening. Maybe it’s because when you’re so high above the storm, the storm doesn’t actually command much of your attention. I’m sorry, chaps. It is extremely evident that you have worked your tails off here. But to what end?Things start off promisingly enough, as the band fire up and cruise into a motorik krautrock groove. It’s hardly an original move, but there’s no shame in that; High Above The Storm are by no means the first to fall in love with the galloping pastoral momentum of Neu’s ‘Hallogallo’ or Can’s shreddingly epic ‘Mother Sky’. But rather than go somewhere new with the influence, as, say, Wilco or Stereolab have done, the band seem to congratulate themselves on their eclectic taste and regress to ably competent MOR rock. It doesn’t help when singer Louis Warner steps to the microphone, chords swelling in predictable crescendo, to breathily announce: “We kept the flame burning bright, knew we were right all along.” You get the sense that despite the references on display, this is going to be a depressingly conservative record.‘Horizon’ bears out this suspicion, treading pretty familiar ground of yearning transcendence-and-release that would make Bono blush. You start to feel embarrassed for the band on ‘Last Year’s Man,’ as Warner indulgently ruminates on fans and performance and being onstage. It’s early days in the band’s career for a number like this; while their ambition is obvious enough, these guys are not Coldplay yet. All the same, it’s a positively chugging track, and you think the band might go somewhere with it.Instead, whatever remaining goodwill the listener might have disappears with Travis Bickle’s “Here is a man who would not take it anymore” monologue from Taxi Driver, laid on thick over the ploddingly solemn beats of ‘Good For Me’. It’s the sad aural equivalent of the gun-toting, mohawked De Niro poster on every other uncomprehending male undergraduate’s dormitory wall. Later on, the instrumental builder ‘For Maurice’ recovers some of the album’s dignity, largely thanks to the absence of any turgid or adolescent vocal musings. But by then it’s also evident that, with or without a singer, this band is much too busy pleasing itself above some storm to have anything to say to us mortals.