Bastinado

Festival season again, and, as if on cue, the debut album from Kilkenny's Wilt arrives in a squall of seamless, subtext-free grunge pop and three-minute mosh-o-ramas readymade for summer location broadcasts on MTV. Novel-reading indie types, move along please, there's nothing to see here.

Wilt's primary-colour tent, for those who have not yet heard their two mindless-but-rather-excellent singles, is pitched directly between Foo Fighters' warm, approachable bluster and the mainstream-radio snotty-punk-lite of Green Day.

Throughout Bastinado, the speeding hormonal rush varies little, the impeccably produced guitar sound not at all, and the lyrics are unmentionably mundane - except that they will, without doubt, be defiantly scribbled on a thousand copybook covers and cherished as God's own truth by the spots-and-Kurt T-shirt brigade worldwide.

Of course, Wilt haven't anything remotely as unknown-quantity or precious as Nirvana's seminal, new-world-order spark: they're merely tending the home fires of post-Cobain American guitar rock, and they do this better than most. Anyway, it's summer; and, as Cormac Battle himself says, "Nothing is important/Everything's alright."

Until autumn beckons, anyway, he may have a point.