I’m starting to develop a bit of a problem with local female-fronted rock bands. This isn’t a chauvinistic “girls shouldn’t do rock” attitude – far from it, as there are plenty of excellent women in rock and metal and so there should be. It’s more that the current crop of bands of that ilk doing the rounds in Oxford simply aren’t particularly good. Typically, they consist of a competent but largely uninspiring pub rock backing band, who want to do ‘Black Album’-era Metallica, but can’t because they have a girl singer, and said girl singer is stuck in the late 80s poodle-rock heyday of Lita Ford, Heart and (god forbid) Tina Turner. It’s like Skunk Anansie, Paramore et al never happened; and they clearly haven’t even heard of Snake River Conspiracy, Rolo Tomassi or Queen Adreena. Either that, or they prefer your Adele/Cheryl Cole/Katie B type singers but have somehow found themselves in a pub rock band instead, so have to paste their idea of what a rock singer should sound like incongruously over the Metallica-lite backing, usually with disastrous results.

I can say this with some authority because I have been in just such a band and we were, in retrospect, uniformly awful, and it was a good thing that we lasted only a few months and played only a couple of gigs. Oxford seems to be increasingly plagued with these bands who lack any character and whose front women, whilst generally being able to sing well (which is definitely preferable to the usual crap bloke shouter) have little interesting to offer in their performances, and lack the rock star charisma that makes any band worth seeing.

All this is leading up to the fact that Dropout, a venerable Oxford band dating back more than eleven years, fall squarely into this category, and that makes me sad and a little disappointed for such an experienced outfit. They’re by no means a bad band, but they’re one that seems to be content to write mediocre 90s rock music for a good but out-of-place singer. The fact that they seem to have got through about half a dozen singers in their eleven years possibly tells part of that story: the demos presented here show a well-rehearsed, confident band who have fairly run of the mill songs. The demos are meant to showcase their latest new singer, who is fine and belts out the tunes with power, but completely lacks anything new or particularly interesting. This becomes especially clear when compared to her predecessor, whose performances grace some of the older recordings on their SoundCloud page and who sounds absolutely identical in her delivery.

In her blurb on the Dropout website, new singer Tara is described as having an opera background, which suggests she’s capable of much more than is presented on these demos. Maybe it’s down to the band to step up and provide something more in keeping with her abilities, something along the lines of Nightwish or Leaves’ Eyes, perhaps? Either way, they need to work on and commit to a sound that fits both the band’s musical aspirations and their singer’s style and abilities.