Crave

Upon their 1999 debut Generation Sap, Cyclefly, with their colourful, strikingly Perry Farrellesque vocalist and their loud mixture of Irish and Italian band members were viewed as an exotic and ferociously glam metal act.

A few years on, while they still look the part, their sound has become a lot easier on the ear.

Lyrically, Crave possesses less of the grand gothic guignol of their debut, with a slightly more sophisticated, if not always staggeringly original, approach to wordplay. The relative simplicity of certain choruses – songs like ‘King For A Day’ (“wishing all my troubles away”) or ‘Bulletproof’ (“how does it feel to be bulletproof?’) – contrasts well with the twisty juxtapositions happening elsewhere, such as the “turnstile obscenities” and “crackpot serenity” we find in ‘Tales From The Fish Bowl’.

Musically, they’ve also mellowed. Songs like the single ‘No Stress’ and ‘Karma Killer’ (featuring Chester Bennington from Linkin Park on backing vocals) are standard if admittedly catchy rock tunes, elevated by expressive guitar effects, but there’s the comfortable embrace of gentle indie angst rather than nu-metal bombast in a lot of the ensuing songs.

I might say soft is the new hard, but I doubt it’ll catch on.