Rant.
I got the free Stereophonics CD that came with yesterday's Sunday Times, and listening to it (well, skipping through a couple of tracks before I couldn't tolerate it any more and had to take it out of the CD player) made me realise just how much I truly hate them.
I really hate Kelly Jones' voice.
I really hate their lyrics, telling small-town vignettes and anecdotes which nobody cares about anymore.
I really hate their album titles. I mean, "JEEP" was truly shit, but "You Gotta Go There To Come Back"!? Is that supposed to be deep and meaningful? Like "You Have To Go To Sleep To Wake Up Again" or something?
I hate them. A lot.
And the sad thing is, I actually used to like them. Their first album was really quite good. Now I feel ashamed to own anything by them, and they just make me want to hit things.
Argh. This review of their new album seems accurate to me:
"Remember when this band had some credibility? Nope, neither do we, so the cool thing to do would be to slag this album off, keeping our pretentious indie cool intact. Well fuck it, if we want to slag this album off, we will no matter how cool it makes us. This album is shite. We know putting down the Stereophonics is not big and it isn’t clever, but its like cleaning out the wax, it's something everyone with ears should be doing.
This album opens with the same trad piss-poor riff driven song that opened ‘JEEP’ and ‘Performance And Cocktails’ before it. I mean, "tonight Matthew we're going to be AC/DC" is a shit way to open any album, never mind every fucking album you ever release. So that’s ‘Help me (She’s Out Of Her Mind)’ covered, and after the first three months of that song we give up and skip to the next one, presuming that it never actually finishes. Track two, ‘Maybe Tomorrow’, sounds like Sting!!! Jesus Kelly we always knew you had it in you, but how the fuck did even you deem this turgid pile of wank bollocks good enough to make its way onto the album? Are your B-sides really THAT bad?
You’ve probably heard the single ‘Madame Helga’ yourself, so we need not tell you about how shit that one is, although we can tell you that the track 'Jealousy' is more of the same only worse. There’s also about five or six songs on this record that challenge 'Step On My Old Size Nines' for the title of "most totally bland it's fucking evil song of all time".
Closing tracks ‘High As The Ceiling’ and ‘Since I Told You Its Over’ should get a mention merely for not being totally God awful, but its hardly a triumph and certainly not enough to save an album of lead weight turd from sinking into the toilet that is the record collection of a Stereophonics fan. Yeah man, these people do exist, usually sat on their own in a pub somewhere pumping the jukebox full of coins so we all have to put up with ‘Pick A Part That’s New’, while they secretly crack one off under the table over the singer of the nights pub covers band.
Kelly Jones is the Ronan Keating of rock - he thinks his opinion is the be all and end all because he happened to get a few teenage girls to buy his records by making them wet. "His voice melts hearts" Smash Hits will no doubt tell you. Well the boy can sing but he plays on the saw dust throat thing so much on this album you can barely tell what the fuck he’s singing half the time. Just as well too, because unlike previous Strereophonics albums, this one is lyrically just as boring and damn right shitty as the music. So it’s a timeless classic then? Well yeah, a classic example of an album you should never own and will be embarrassed about purchasing before your even halfway through listening to it, and timeless in the sense that whatever time in history you visited this would be laughed at and labelled as complete utter shite. We warn you now ‘You Gotta Go There To Come Back’ is probably an evil marketing ploy by Sony to get you to wear out the skip button causing you to buy a new Hi-Fi. Either that or Kelly Jones just gave up trying to be any good after realising the shitter Stereophonics are the more albums they sell. If you love the smug pub rock tosser though, can we at least recommend you wait till Christmas when this album gets re-released with ‘Hand Bags And Glad Rags’ on?"
Rant over.
I really hate Kelly Jones' voice.
I really hate their lyrics, telling small-town vignettes and anecdotes which nobody cares about anymore.
I really hate their album titles. I mean, "JEEP" was truly shit, but "You Gotta Go There To Come Back"!? Is that supposed to be deep and meaningful? Like "You Have To Go To Sleep To Wake Up Again" or something?
I hate them. A lot.
And the sad thing is, I actually used to like them. Their first album was really quite good. Now I feel ashamed to own anything by them, and they just make me want to hit things.
Argh. This review of their new album seems accurate to me:
"Remember when this band had some credibility? Nope, neither do we, so the cool thing to do would be to slag this album off, keeping our pretentious indie cool intact. Well fuck it, if we want to slag this album off, we will no matter how cool it makes us. This album is shite. We know putting down the Stereophonics is not big and it isn’t clever, but its like cleaning out the wax, it's something everyone with ears should be doing.
This album opens with the same trad piss-poor riff driven song that opened ‘JEEP’ and ‘Performance And Cocktails’ before it. I mean, "tonight Matthew we're going to be AC/DC" is a shit way to open any album, never mind every fucking album you ever release. So that’s ‘Help me (She’s Out Of Her Mind)’ covered, and after the first three months of that song we give up and skip to the next one, presuming that it never actually finishes. Track two, ‘Maybe Tomorrow’, sounds like Sting!!! Jesus Kelly we always knew you had it in you, but how the fuck did even you deem this turgid pile of wank bollocks good enough to make its way onto the album? Are your B-sides really THAT bad?
You’ve probably heard the single ‘Madame Helga’ yourself, so we need not tell you about how shit that one is, although we can tell you that the track 'Jealousy' is more of the same only worse. There’s also about five or six songs on this record that challenge 'Step On My Old Size Nines' for the title of "most totally bland it's fucking evil song of all time".
Closing tracks ‘High As The Ceiling’ and ‘Since I Told You Its Over’ should get a mention merely for not being totally God awful, but its hardly a triumph and certainly not enough to save an album of lead weight turd from sinking into the toilet that is the record collection of a Stereophonics fan. Yeah man, these people do exist, usually sat on their own in a pub somewhere pumping the jukebox full of coins so we all have to put up with ‘Pick A Part That’s New’, while they secretly crack one off under the table over the singer of the nights pub covers band.
Kelly Jones is the Ronan Keating of rock - he thinks his opinion is the be all and end all because he happened to get a few teenage girls to buy his records by making them wet. "His voice melts hearts" Smash Hits will no doubt tell you. Well the boy can sing but he plays on the saw dust throat thing so much on this album you can barely tell what the fuck he’s singing half the time. Just as well too, because unlike previous Strereophonics albums, this one is lyrically just as boring and damn right shitty as the music. So it’s a timeless classic then? Well yeah, a classic example of an album you should never own and will be embarrassed about purchasing before your even halfway through listening to it, and timeless in the sense that whatever time in history you visited this would be laughed at and labelled as complete utter shite. We warn you now ‘You Gotta Go There To Come Back’ is probably an evil marketing ploy by Sony to get you to wear out the skip button causing you to buy a new Hi-Fi. Either that or Kelly Jones just gave up trying to be any good after realising the shitter Stereophonics are the more albums they sell. If you love the smug pub rock tosser though, can we at least recommend you wait till Christmas when this album gets re-released with ‘Hand Bags And Glad Rags’ on?"
Rant over.