With their place at the top of NME’s 100 bands you have to hear! right! now! (or whatever they’re calling it) and at number three in said publication’s best new bands of 2011, Minnesota’s Howler can rest easy knowing they’re the saviours of guitar music as we know it – we can be thankful, I suppose, that it’s not Lana Del Ray everyone’s harping on about for a change. Signed to Rough Trade, young of age and with excellent hair (19 year old singer Jordan Gatesmith came in at number 44 in everyone’s favourite “cool” list), you’d be well within your rights to agree with the NME – and Johnny Marr – and tout America Give Up as the codex to which all music hereafter should be copied from. That however would be a touch hasty as although there are some good tunes on their debut album, Howler are essentially massively derivative.

Apparently formed out of boredom in Minneapolis in 2010, Howler released debut EP This One’s Different in August of 2011 after a demo tape found its way to Rough Trade, with the title track and ‘Told You Once’ appearing again on the album. It’s immediately apparent that the band are inspired by The Strokes, Ramones, Jesus and Mary Chain and ’50s rock n’ roll. Nothing wrong with that of course (the source material’s better, but let’s not go down that avenue) and the choruses and hooks are, at a few points over the course of half an hour, wonderfully catchy but in the end we really should be looking for more from bands, shouldn’t we? Look, for example, at Girls, who are both backward and forward-looking in their music, making records that are fun, inspirational and emotional, taking from the past but presenting it in a way that renders it new and exciting. Howler are young, and in time they may create fantastic music but for now the art lacks an edge.

So, on to the music. Opener ‘Beach Sluts’ (how lovely) rattles along with Spector-esque drum fills, and has a noisy and enjoyable chorus; ‘Back to the Grave’ looks to the future of a relationship and sees a breakup, all to a Mary Chain feedback setting, and ‘This One’s Different’ is a fine punk-pop track made more interesting by Gatesmith’s strangled vocals. The track ‘America’ is a sarcastic nod to the album title, with a snotty Gatesmith proclaiming “I wanna be an American… just like you” and later sighing “I give up” repeatedly as the track fades out. There is a resigned element to a lot of Gatesmith’s lyrics, whether about himself, a relationship or his country, which begins to make America Give Up something of an interesting proposition, but it’s not enough.

Tracks like ‘Too Much Blood’, ‘Told You Once’, ‘Free Drunk’ and ‘Black Lagoon’ are all deathly dull and verging on pastiche – particularly the latter – and ruin what was a promising start to the record. Half good is not good enough.

Is Howler the future of guitar music? In a word, no. Could they go on to make more interesting and individual records? Quite possibly: they don’t seem utterly irredeemable in the way that The Vaccines (their closest British comparison) appear to be, so where’s there’s life, there’s hope. Gatesmith and co. have the passion, and if they ignore the hype from certain circles then they won’t be forgotten by the time 2013 comes round and we’re eagerly awaiting the next list comprising of music’s bright hopes.