To call an album Crossing the Rubicon seems like a very deliberate move by The Sounds. In retrospect though, it's a fitting one for this third album by Swedish pop rock band The Sounds - this is an album which often seems to be themed around making bold steps, about overcoming the past and defiantly moving forward. It has a strident, confident feel to it, demonstrated by the sound and especially title of the opening track 'No One Sleeps While I'm Awake'. Largely, this is pounding but accessible rock, with fairly heavy doses of synthesiser bathing Maja Ivarsson's vocals. She is always the dominating force here - the songs are often built around her slightly odd but satisfying voice, and aside from her no other components ever really stand out. It's not that there's anything wrong with the actual instrumentation on the album as such, it's just that it's rarely, if ever, inspiring.This is a very solid rather than stellar effort, then. The band genuinely stumble rarely - 'Beatbox' is admittedly something of a disaster though. Sounding a bit like the kind of song a band explicitly writes to get crowds warmed up in a live setting, it comes off sounding overwhelmingly contrived, sounds disturbingly appropriate as a soundtrack to the video for Billie Piper's 'Because We Want To', and goes some way to quashing the momentum that the first four songs had managed to build up, most recently the oddly-worded 'Dorchester Hotel'. The Sounds do seem to one of those Swedish bands whose grasp of English in their lyrics is a tad lacking, and whilst there aren't any out-and-out howlers of lines on here, it is a little disconcerting at times.But when the band launch into one of their choruses, it's very hard to dislike them. The simple sentiment of 'Midnight Sun' represents a good example, a song which seems to sum up much of the album in the lyrics "still so young and anxious to be free / but now I'm trapped inside / all these memories". That tug of war between the past and the future is familiar to all of us, and so too is the music that The Sounds make. This is the kind of album you could put on in almost any context and be sure that you wouldn't offend or alienate anyone, but there's nothing wrong with that. This is a thoroughly competent and immediate rock album. 61%The Sounds on MySpace