While it may have taken them a while to explode into the public eye, the latest crop of Brit guitar bands are certainly not hanging about. Bloc Party and Maximo Park are already back in the studio, the Arctic Monkeys look to be as productive as hell and only the Kaiser Chiefs, by virtue of their success, look to be suffering – locked into another round of energy and creativity-sapping touring.
The Futureheads, however, have done a Franz Ferdinand and got their second album out no more than a year on from their first. Whether it’s a particularly wise move remains to be seen as, in parts anyway, News And Tributes seems a touch rushed. Nor does it make any huge leaps on from their debut, the quirky riffs and pronounced Sunderland accents giving the thing a distinct feeling of déjà vu – something that could well be a problem for all these bands.
The Futureheads’ main problem remains that they only really work when they write or cover great songs; ‘Decent Days And Nights’, ‘Meantime’ and ‘Hounds Of Love’ were all so good that the rest of that first record looked a bit thin in comparison. It’s the same with News And Tributes.
There is some fantastic stuff here. After a couple of iffy openers, they hit a run of four splendid songs – ‘Skip To The End’ sounds like AC/DC meets Wire, while the title track is inexplicably about the Munich air disaster. The tuneless ‘Return To The Beserker’ rather kills the mood before ‘Back To The Sea’ proves that they can do lovely as well as quirky.
Ultimately it’s that kind of album, really good when it’s good, just a bit of a non-event when it’s not. Whether they get the chance to have a third go at getting it completely right may, you fear, now be out of their hands.