Years after Puppy Love Bomb, The Hormones and an invitation to Brian Wilson’s birthday party, Marc Carroll is still churning out well-crafted records. And that’s a problem. With its textured vocals, Byrdsy guitars and harmonies, bland sentiments (“Love will rule our hearts”, “It’s a cold and lonely, sad and lonely world”) and trad-influenced melodies, Dust Of Rumour is immaculately put together but ultimately quite dull.
What Carroll probably needs to do in order to break this cycle, is to make something brutally devoid of craft – a tasteless disco album, a one chord punk record, or his own version of Metal Machine Music, and then when he bounces back afterwards with another Celtic-folk-tinged Byrds record, reviewers (like myself) will imagine that it’s infused with this experimental spirit and call it “a return to form”. To be fair, ‘That Just Might Be What I’ve Been Waiting For’ is the best song The Byrds never wrote.

Key Track: ‘That Just Might Be What I’ve Been Waiting For’