Martin Grech

Dear Cherryfalls,

                    Whatever in god's name makes you think that it's even _remotely_ interesting to be yet another trainee Thom/child of Coldplay?? What is this dour faced bollocks that I see and hear **far** too often these days? How can bands so thoroughly lacking in ambition and identity as yourselves exist? (One and a half songs later I couldn't bear another note and ran downstairs. Like watching a board meeting while listening to someone scroll through their 100 new ringtones.)

Dear Martin Grech,

                    I saw you open the main stage at T-In-The-Park a month or two ago, and you knocked me on my ass with your sometimes beautiful, sometimes anguished, sometimes pure and sometimes dirty freeform expressionist rock, and I was **so** looking forward to seeing you here, but somehow today, I saw a zoo _without_ an open heart. I watched your face, and saw the smile and felt like you were playing with us, and it was nice to see you having such a good time, or at least seeming to, but it didn't **work** with your music. The quiet haunting section and wet vocals suddenly sounded pompous (not helped by the general lo-fi acoustics in the Monarch), your cathartic self-expression couldn't stand up with the evident lack of catharsis, and it made me think that in the days when Britain's expressionista-in-chief, Thom Yorke, is in a happy mood he can fall back on a whole load of big assed rockers and poppers from his first three albums, and right now you haven't got that option. I guess at the festival you were trying to win the audience and it pushed you to reach inside and howl from the belly of your existence, whereas here, in a venue that you could have sold out twice over, there was no chance at all that you were going to go down badly, but rather than use that buoyant crowd to propel your performance to a whole new level, you seemed to just wallow in it, lapping up the jacuzzi of applause, and though the band rocked just _fine_, and your voice soared and shrieked to perfection, I'm sad to say my heart wasn't moved an inch.

DiScuss.... With numerous artists in some neverending competition to fill the vacuum Jeff Buckley left behind, and with Evisceral Beauty^(R) now on the menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner...is the reason The Darkness are going meteoric because their tabloid tunes very effectively prick that balloon of self-indulgence?**