RichPickings, Jun 30, 2008
RichPickings of arcticreviews wrote:
Every so often the tree of indie needs to be refreshed with the blood of drainpipes, or something. With this in mind and The Kooks seemingly imploding, The Enemy causing a fight in an empty room and The View having disappeared back to Tayside, a vacancy at the movement’s highly lucrative top table seems to have made it available. Cue One Night Only.
So young that they think the Gulf War was a kick off between rival petrol stations, the quintet are descended from that hoakiest of institutions - a school band - and hail from a picturesque village in North Yorkshire in which little apparently has happened since the local castle was built in the 13th century. Singer George Craig is seventeen and has a voice which bears a strong resemblance to Luke Pritchard, but it isn't that or the band's youth which is the problem; it's a lack of personality. Whilst One Night Only look like nice young men who - were they not dressed by their record company's stylists - would probably be happy in a pair of tracksuit bottoms, musically most of Started A Fire is rife with derivation and too slight to stand up to close scrutiny.
Alarm bells always ring when a producer utilises the trick of sequencing an album's stand out song first; the prosecution gives you opener Just For Tonight, an enthusiastic cross between Enola Gay and anything from The Killers brit pop obsessed first album, gambling along as if the transition to arena rock was a formality. The other nine tracks have similar ingredients, but the pace is sluggish and there are no booze soaked characters, choppy teen holies or arbitrarily repressed cross dressers to give proceedings a bit of interest. First single You and Me really does sound like The Kooks, embarrassingly so, Stay At Home is a painfully strident attempt at splicing a pre-pubescent Pete n' Carl with The Kaisers, but along with everything else here it ends up making a cup of tea for your mum and remembering to put the toilet seat down, coming to rest nestling cheerily somewhere between The Feeling and The Hoosiers.
Of course, being quintessentially NOT rock and roll has its advantages - they may even remember some of it during their forties - but our fascination with people singing about doing the things we daren’t do is part of what makes music so compelling. There is no worse sin than ageism. But when callow youth regresses to tuck shop values, it’s time for detention.
3.0/5 (