The Mono Effect come to us from Cambridge, but if you listened to Giants without having known that you'd think they were probably American, sounding as they do like stateside bands along the lines of Alkaline Trio. Full of thrashy but uninteresting guitars and bombastic but uninventive drumming and little else, Giants is an almost unremittingly heavy rock album which apes various tropes along the American rock/punk/emo axis without mastering any of them.It says quite a lot about Giants that when the first slow track appears at number 8, it's inspiringly called "Lull" but is so hugely boring that its title ends up seeming like a clever bit of rhyming slang. "Stand up for me, and be my friend..." they sing. Of course they can't keep this up for a whole song so the fuzzy guitars crank back up towards the end. In fact for an album that hangs so heavily on its guitar assault, they really could have been better produced - they all merge so completely together that many of the riffs are just lost in waves of distortion and smog. In the end, instead of sounding furious and aggressive like some of the bands The Mono Effect want to emulate, they end up sounding a bit tame.The vocals are barely any more interesting. On "Kill the Mood" we get barrages of pretty horrid screamo vocals which surely nobody wants, certainly when they feel as they do here. Admittedly on "Confidence" we can kind of see what the band are trying to achieve, with its catchy chorus and single-mindedness, but ultimately Giants is an album on which a UK band worship at the altar of some of the worst US guitar music can offer these days. 42%