The hardest working man in indie-rock. That’s what it says here. Leo’s fifth studio album brims with his love of British indie music from the past forty years. Each song has nods and winks to his musical heroes; Strummer, Partridge, Davies and Costello all make spiritual appearances during this album. When this works, it works well. The excellent La Costa Brava and The Sons of Cain are the real standouts here, these burst out of your speakers with aggression, timing and crunching riffs that mesmerise your ears. The former sounds like the Clash channelled through the 80’s with it’s chugging guitar chords and angular riffs jarring through the middle whilst the latter sounds like The Pogues if they’d listened to more rock music and turned down the fiddles. However the rest of the album feels laboured and bloated. Who Do You Love? sounds like Costello at his least interested, Bomb. Repeat. Bomb. sounds like Rage Against The Machine without the bite whilst Colleen sounds like Oasis circa Be Here Now. There’s no denying that Leo has the ability to write songs and a catchy riff or two, but this sounds like a covers record.

When he hits the mark its when he’s blending his influences and stamping his own authority on them rather than simply aping them. His attempts at writing politically motivated songs come across as sub-Manics, sixth form politics students level. C.I.A. and Bomb. Repeat. Bomb. attack his beloved US of A but they don’t really say anything. As for the woeful A Bottle Of Buckie I thought songs like this went out with the ark. What doesn’t help is that the songs, and the album as a whole, just drags on and on. There’s 14 songs here, two of them are interludes / intro’s, but the rest just don’t seem do anything. The indie-rock by numbers routine gets a little tiresome after a while.

This is definitely his most lack lustre work to date, previous albums have seen him put his own stamp on proceedings, whereas here it just sounds as though he’s run out of ideas. When you hear the songs that do work, Brava and Cain to name the two, the rest of the album can only disappoint, which, in the end, is a great shame for an artist as much loved and as obviously motivated as Ted Leo.

Links:
Ted Leo [official site] [myspace]