Bicester’s ‘Modern Clichés‘ certainly win the Arthur Pewty Most Boring Name Award for 2008, but is the music any livelier than the label? The answer is: not massively. Their speciality is pitched somewhere between mild-mannered punk and unfunky funk-pop, but all the same, they do it quite pleasingly at times.
‘You Don’t Know what You Want to Be’ is a punky put-down song directed against some annoying rock-star wannabe. Phil Warson may actually be a touch too tuneful a vocalist to carry this sort of song off, which should sear rather than spar but occasionally, even from this reluctant pugilist, a punch connects:
“Think it’s OK cos you say you’re a rock star/Well that’s tonight, most other nights you work behind the bar”
Musically, the three-piece band is tight, tuneful and well-produced, with Andy Payne’s nimble, cheeky drumming a standout. Less impressive is the EP’s dreary title track, which detours towards Chili Peppers territory to no great effect, the lyric being some opaque expression of suburban discontent, complete with fake plastic smiles. Closer ‘Exactly the Same as Always’ is about as exciting as the prospect of a threesome with Janet Street Porter and Aggie from ‘How Clean is Your House?’, but it is a little more melodically sophisticated than the other two, with a nod to The Lightning Seeds’ ‘Pure’.
‘Modern Clichés’ are by no means a bad band, but they suffer from a pronounced lack of direction. If they’re going to be a punk band, they could do worse than head down to the Junkie Brush Halloween gig to hear the beast red in tooth and claw. If they want to do pop, they’ll need to find more interesting subjects to write about than Bicesterian rock-star fantasists, and steer clear of the half-baked funk.