Say hello to North London’s latest indie offerings The Playing Fields. Having been around in different guises for the past few years the band have finally got round to releasing their debut album. The Playing Fields are a product of brothers Steve and Mike Bland, they write acoustic led indie indie set to an often stark and atmospheric backing. Joined by Hannah Sless , Ron Rosenblum and Jeff Baskett the band have been regulars on the London scene for some time and it shows. The songs are well formed, these guys obviously know what makes something pleasing to the ear – the arrangements being fairly flawless.

The problems start when you look a little deeper into the songs and realise that there is little or no personality within the music. You can listen to the entire album and nothing sticks out, sure its pleasant enough but there is nothing engaging about it, which is a real shame because you find yourself wanting to like what you hear. “Nonesuch Nameless” could be a great song, it starts off promising with a delicate lead guitar line but come the verse it ends up sounding like Nickelback (remember them?), it does redeem itself however in the final minute with a sterling guitar solo that produces a fantastic wall of sound which is the only truly heart stopping moment on the whole record. Sylvia Thompson comes off sounding somewhere in between Idlewild at their most genteel and melodic and “Sleep Alone”-era Wonderstuff. It just about hits the mark and is a moderate success.

The main problem here in my opinion is that these guys take themselves far too seriously to the point where the weaker moments on here feel too contrived. The pained vocals sound ever so slightly put on, affected even. Protect The Humans is a real low point here, the only true ‘rocker’ on the album, its basically a pointless 5 minute jam with Mike rambling on about being Superman and Batman – the pained vocals turned up to 11 here. It falls flat and leaves you reaching for the skip button. This rather embarrassing song is saved by “Glass & Concrete” which has a lovely guitar and harmonica passage with possibly the best vocal performance on the whole album. Here you can tell that our singer means every note that comes out of his mouth thus leaving us with the only truly ‘honest’ sounding song on the whole album.

Its a patchy album at best, it has glimmers of promise but unfortunately fails to convince. Its a shame, because the talent is obviously there, these guys can all play and the production is flawless its just a shame that the sum of its parts doesn’t live up to the bands potential.