I’ve been putting off reviewing this record. You can probably tell by the fact that it’s already been out about three weeks. That’s because reviewing it requires me to listen to it more than once.

This is music for people who hate music. It is music for the shirtless late-twenties fuck at the back of the crowd at some disgusting Gomorrah of a festival, eyeing up girls half his age and dancing behind his ridiculous over-sized sunglasses. It is music for people whose aesthetic year zero is April 1995, and for whom V Festival is the essence of counterculture. It is music for (and indeed made by) the people who keep sinking tenners in HMV on whatever carbon copy of mediocrity it is that Sony (who deserve to collapse for this) is whoring today, simply because they are stymied by their own chronic lack of imagination.

Listening to this record is a profoundly depressing experience. Depressing not just because you could be doing something so much more enjoyable, like listening to that shit school band your friends were in, or rolling your own eyeballs in the ashes of your loved ones and feeding them to yourself. No, depressing because one becomes instantly aware of the vast range of decent music to which The View have clearly never had any exposure. This record has a thousand reference points – but they all relate either to tiny-cocked American stadium rock bands that were a fucking laughing stock even the first time round (‘Life’), or to wrist-slittingly myopic suburban Weller worshippers (virtually every other song on the album).

I was determined for this not to end up being a hatchet job. But Bread and Circuses, aside from being without doubt the worst-titled record I have ever encountered, is a truly offensive piece of work. Come the looming revolution, everyone responsible for this fetid excretion will get their time against the wall.