5-piece Oxford band Spring Offensive are keen to distance themselves from comparisons with Radiohead. Their eponymous debut ep released last year started the ball rolling, but special features on Radio 1 and BBC 6Music, ceaseless touring with a growing reputation for intense live shows, a string of self-releases and a city with a musical ‘scene’ based more on the quality of bands like Foals and Stornoway than any shared musical identity, have all added interest … people are starting to talk! Unfortunately, the Radiohead bugbear probably taints every band within a 50-mile-radius of Oxford, and ironically, Spring Offensive featured on BBC Radio Oxford’s charity record Round the Bends, a tribute to “you-know-who”, released earlier this year. So are the comparisons with Oxford’s finest wide of the mark?

Well, ‘yes’ and ‘no’, on the basis of Pull Us Apart, the band’s neat mini-album, 7 songs centred around personal obsession with an almost unrelentingly bleak mood running throughout. That said, if you can deal with the gloom, there’s certainly a lot to admire on this album. I would call the compositions ‘thoughtfully-explosive’, musicianship often playing to the strength of the songs rather than hammering them into submission. Sure, there’s blasting guitar histrionics of the quiet-loud sound which Radiohead pioneered on The Bends, but Spring Offensive songs are often accompanied with clever lyrical twists which hint at a lot more … if only they could lighten up a little, for an old-timer’s sake? One review I read compared their lyrics to those of Ian Curtis of Joy Division, but the songs here relate dark tales of gritty reality rather than anything ethereal. Pull Us Apart is certainly no ‘Love will tear us apart’, imagine being stuck in a dark place on a Saturday night, probably somewhere you shouldn’t, 2 strangers in front of you telling blood-curdling stories that just can’t be true … can they? There you have it.

Opener ‘Abacus Rex’, starts innocently enough, with a riff which could easily pass for Robert Fripp and King Crimson, but rapidly cascades into Radiohead-like intensity with distorted guitars and drum blasts. However, the real curiosity is the song’s lyric, the obsessive thoughts of mathematician AlanTuring, caving in under the pressure to crack the enigma code before his suicide. Very odd indeed, especially as the band deliver the song to its desperate end by dropping the volume and tempo for dramatic effect, brave and original, an opening gambit that marks out the territory for the remainder of ‘Pull us apart’. ‘Every Coin’ is the story of a mugging victim forced to eat the entire contents of his wallet. Another strange and initially disturbing topic, but singer Lucas Whitworth relishes a turn of phrase, and it seems the protagonist wants to punish the victim because of capitalism rather than anything personal. Again, the band again crank things up to crescendo at the end … but did he manage to get all the coins down …?

‘Anything Other Than This’ is a bit too close to Coldplay for comfort… The music soars up and down, a clever metaphor for the band’s own ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ (“Just think of all we could have done in the hours that we lost … so we’ve already lost the plot but now we’re losing our way”). ‘I Found Myself Smiling’ recounts another dark tale of murder and intrigue, the jilted lover ranting “if you want to join your lover, you’d better slide into the river like the rat that you are.” Charmed, I’m sure. ‘Little Evening’ has a tender thoughtful soul, which belies its bittersweet memory (”I hope that isn’t all that is left, a sorry little evening for the stony road ahead”), but the songs apparent harmlessness is played out curiously with real menace and static crackles from the band … what’s going on here, I wonder? ‘Slow Division’ seems like the dark riposte which Sting’s ‘Message in a Bottle’ has been crying out for all these years. But said bottle is from a sinking ship, a suicide note from somebody who doesn’t want to leave. And just when you thought things couldn’t get any more depressing, up pops ‘The cable routine’, serial self-harmer getting his kicks out of preparing for suicide each night, standing on the balcony with a cable at his side … time for some high-dosage prozac methinks.

Flippancy aside, you’ll have to wait a bit longer for the full-length debut from Spring Offensive, which on the strength of Pull As Apart must surely follow. Lucas Whitworth and band are keen to engage your brain before they blast you with more conventional rock intensity. Dark edgy lyrics which hook you in and music that cleverly delivers the song to your ears … this album repays further listens as Spring Offensive take a step beyond the Radiohead comparisons and signal they’re probably in it for the long haul … just don’t hold your breath expecting an album of light fluffy pop songs.