As if to deflect criticism from the off, Bring A Guillotine describe themselves on their Myspace as “like a really bad Joy Division song… but worse”. Such cumbersome faux-modesty should be enough to get anyone’s back up, but then there’s the band’s singer to contend with. I’ve no idea what his name is since the band’s line-up is listed only as “Earth, Wind and Fire” (crazy, crazy people, huh?), but he sings with the mock operatic baritone of a Friday night market town pub Johnny Cash impersonator, digging deep for gravelly country gravitas, something he might almost get away with if he had a single ounce of variety at his disposal.
`Watership Downs’ sounds like a karaoke take on Cash’s version of Nine Inch Nails’ `Hurt’ with lo-fi back-up from a comatose-drunk Wedding Present. Come `Madeleine’, the karaoke Cash has lightened his mood slightly and The Wedding Present have woken from their booze-induced slumber but forgotten how to play and so they all bugger off to the kitchen to mainline filter coffee, leaving an apparently completely different band to perform `In Your Name’, a spindly, spaced-out piano ballad led by an untrained adenoidal whine that dribbles along in ungainly fashion and without even the good sense of direction to tip itself out of the nearest window. And thus Mr Karoake Cash and his minimalist cohorts stumble back into the room to darken the mood a little, pausing only to rhyme “Beemer” with “Argentina”.
The shame with all this is that it could have been a lot of fun. The singer is so over the top you want him to really go to town but he prefers to drone on until his foghorn voice starts to remind you of an overbearing, drunken uncle at a wedding reception, while the band seem incapable or completely unwilling to drag themselves up from random shuffle mode and kick some life into the songs. If they know what’s good for them they’ll nip down to HMV pronto and treat themselves to a copy of `The Drift’ by Scott Walker and `The Best Of Morecambe & Wise'; something to prick their musical ambition and something to provide them with some better jokes in future.