Well at least they don’t look or sound like Flock Of Seagulls. Yes, we can actually report that there is a new guitar band around who don’t hark back to a particular period in time about twenty years ago. No, New York’s Ambulance Ltd look both further back to the ‘60s and ‘70s and forward to the ‘90s and, good God no, shoegazing. The problem is that they don’t seem to quite know which era or what band they want to borrow from, opting instead to chuck everything in and hope for the best.
Opening track ‘Yoga Means Union’ is an impressively moody Mogwai style instrumental but after that the four-piece dart all over the place, from Sonic Youth riffs to indie guitar pop, the studied emotion of Elliot Smith and jazz rock wig outs. None of it sticks and they achieve the feat of making a record with so many disparate influences sound depressingly samey. A bit more focus wouldn’t go amiss next time round.