CURVE: "Cuckoo" (Anxious)

CUCKOO IS the kind of album that's likely to bamboozle you as you're making a compilation tape for a lengthy car journey or large gathering of friends. Towards the end of the second side of a ninety minute tape, when you start to run out of hip and happening songs and don't particularly feel like relying on staples like, say, 'Bizarre Love Triangle' or 'Fool's Gold', you throw on a Curve track because on first listen it sounds pretty cool.

But sooner or later - it may be a few hours or a few days, three listens or twenty - you'll have to face up to the fact that you've done exactly what you were trying most to avoid. Right smack in the middle of an otherwise superb compilation tape, you've put a dud - a dee-you-dee, dud.

As it turns out you would have been better off turning to some oldies but goodies, because all this Curve album really consists of is songs that sound like they were written and recorded three years ago then promptly forgotten about. Relying heavily on echoing, druggy vocals and circular guitars, Curve seem to be stuck in a generic Manchester groove with nothing but an overactive interest in Depeche Mode-ish industrial beats and clanking to distinguish them from any number of shaggy-haired Brits.

'Crystal' and 'Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus' sound like poor imitations of Kate Bush singing with the Mode, and 'All of One', like an undeveloped Sinead O'Connor fronting the Soup Dragons. And so the rest of Cuckoo goes, with little evidence of any real forward progression on the band's part and not a curve ball in sight.

• Tara McCarthy