“Paddy McGuiness is coming. With his joke.”
- Stewart Lee, Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, 2011

“We Were Promised Jetpacks are coming. With their song.”
- Me, The Line of Best Fit, Now.

Stewart Lee’s website has a section dedicated to plagiarists, where Lee pays tribute to people who he perceives as “borrowing” from his work without permission. I have no ambition to end up there, but I like to imagine that the other side of Stewart Lee, the studious Sunday Times music journalist, wouldn’t mind me appropriating his line here.

Sometimes WWPJ play their song fast and furious. Other times they play it slow and furious. Sometimes they just play it furious. I don’t know what it is, but WWPJ are fucking furious about something.

I got a little over-heated a couple of years back about WWPJ’s debut album, These Four Walls; perhaps misguidedly so. I’ve since gone back and revisited that record, and while it is by no means a trainwreck, I think I got carried away in the same youthful exuberance that I described in the review — in hindsight, the record is littered with hints that WWPJ were still a work in progress, and in my excitement the record’s energy and passion blinded me from its now all-too-obvious faults. A year later, WWPJ dropped an EP, The Last Place You’ll Look, which contained their best song so far, ‘A Far Cry’ — on which the band spent three minutes carefully building a house of cards, and two minutes smashing it to pieces — as well as some intelligent, quieter re-workings of cuts from These Four Walls. The tracks showed a more subtle understanding of noise-folk dynamics, and a willingness to experiment with mood and texture more freely than at any point on their debut. The opening lyric to ‘A Far Cry’ — “you cried like a child / who’d just seen their own blood / for the first time” — was the kind of evocative gnomon that James Graham, of labelmates the Twilight Sad, would have been proud.

So the regression here, to something that doesn’t even sound as mature or cultivated as their subtle-as-a-sledgehammer debut, is a real shame. Darren Lackie has traded in the nuanced performances from The Last Place You’ll Look for a pnuematic-drill approach to drumming, while both Michael Palmer’s guitar and Sean Smith’s bass spend nearly the entire album turned up to eleven. The production is Steve Albini-lite, at times sounding like every member of the band took a turn behind the desk, pushing themselves to the fore, until everything just becomes an indistinguishable buzz. It’s a production technique that can be hugely effective when the full dynamic range is being utilised — see The Wedding Present’s Seamonsters for the best example of this — but here, WWPJ just drown each other out in a wall of compression and noise. Every song simply bleeds into the next, and you could be forgiven most of the time for not realising that the track had changed.

Adam Thompson’s lack of versatility as a singer does the band no favours; he snarls nearly every line he sings, and when he’s singing lyrics as insipid as “life in a coma / could be quite fun” it becomes difficult to take him seriously. Thompson’s introduction to the album is singing the words “I’ve been walking in squares, and circles, and squares again”, a tepid twist on a cliche which illicits no emotional response but simply begs the question, “What squares? Leicester Square? Trafalgar, innit?” Thompson aims for Frightened Rabbit-esque melancholy, but Scott Hutchinson’s misery sounds authentic because it’s tempered by his genuine wit, and contrasted against his lighter moments. Thompson’s sounds forced, like a simulacrum of the real thing. Frightened Rabbit sound like a Glaswegian thunderstorm, WWJP sometimes struggle to muster up a mild drizzle.

It’s an odd decision on the part of the band to aim for stadium-filling anthems so frequently, when, on past evidence, they sound much more comfortable in their quieter moments. Thompson’s vocals spend the vast majority of the record at the upper limit of his range, leaving him with nowhere further to go, no room for development — like a horror film that reveals its most gruesome moment in the first ten minutes, In the Pit‘s ten tracks continually blow their load way too early. Without the slow-building catharsis offered by like-minded acts My Latest Novel or the Twilight Sad, In the Pit…gives you everything it’s got from the word go, which feels less like a build-and-release formula than a continued pummelling of your eardrums for three-quarters of an hour.

When I ended my review of These Four Walls speculating that WWPJ would “come back with something even fucking better”, I had genuine hopes that they would. And I still do. In the Pit… isn’t a total disaster, it’s simply not very good, and perhaps the most disappointing thing about it is how boring a failure it is. The band haven’t over-stretched themselves or stumbled over their own haughty ambitions, which might have been forgivable; instead, they just sound lacking in inspiration. For a band who promised so much early on, it’s a real let-down to hear them trot out something as flat and workmanlike as this. A band can get by on having one song, played in a variety of different ways, but not when it’s this one.