- Artists:
- The Vines »
- Label:
- Cooking Vinyl »
Stripped of their deal with EMI, Sydney’s most famous prodigal children return for one more round with little more than three chords and a prayer.
Everything about The Vines’ fourth album, Melodia, feels budget, from the wretched cover art to the stinking production (it sounds as if Rob Schnapf was so embarassed to be there, he rush-recorded these 14 songs in as many hours). The songwriting is even worse: the best cuts here would have had the band laughed out of the studio in their prime.
Listeners wishing to delve beneath frontman Craig Nichols’ preternaturally blank exterior will be left just as cold. “Once I was a young man / No one could understand / Wasting time every day / He got nothing to say,” _ reveals the painfully close-to-the-bone _‘He’s A Rocker’. As if we didn’t already have that home truth down. Even worse, ballads like ‘Kara Jayne’ devolve into almost unprecidented depths of schmaltz.
Melodia is the sound of a petulant child throwing a tantrum. The problem is, the louder and redder-faced Nichols becomes, the less anyone is willing to offer him the attention he craves. The man-boy has nothing (more) to say. He’s stuck raging in his own real life Groundhog Day, doomed to write the same two songs in perpetuity, desperate to revisit the heights of his debut.
Any fleeting chance that The Vines will rekindle the spark of their early promise has been well and truly snuffed. This is not just the band’s worst record, it’s also the worst record with any profile to be released this year.
The Vines
Wow.
Just..wow. Really that bad? :(
Ouch!
Shame though as they wrote some cracking tunes back in the day. Much of their debut is very good and 'Winning Days' of the album of the same name is a quite brilliant tune.
Can't wait to hear this.
Very reassuring for any record to get panned by this site. Think I'll buy it tomorrow.
That cover's brilliant.
You couldn't escape them back in '02
Now they seemt to have vanished off the face of the earth. It was only by chance i saw this review.
Highly Evolved wasn't bad, it just didn't deserve all the praise that was thrown at it.
holy jesus
that cover is making my eyes bleed. wretched.
I quite like Vision Valley
So sad to see this now.
fuck
are these guys still going?
lol
i enjoyed this review.
Sad
I like the first three albums. Some brilliant tunes. Haven't heard any of this yet.
First album was great
But Nicholls dug his own grave by swearing up and down that he would change and experiment with the band's sound on each successive album. God knows why he didn't (money, probably) and this is where it's brought them: They are now the Nirvana/Beatles pastiche they always threatened to be. The second album was half brilliance/half insanely dull, the third one had maybe two good songs whose names I can't recall, and this one is just a steaming pile of cockroach vomit marinading in the dead cerebrum of a Kurt Cobain wannabe. I really wish he'd develop a serious mental illness and write another '1969' or 'Sunshinin.'
Was looking through the old reviews of the band
and found this quote from 'Winning Days'
"From here, The Vines will go one of two ways. Either Nicholls will throw a big strop with the media and spend the rest of his career tossing out similarly substandard albums with gradually diminishing returns a la The Cranberries,"
That is exactly right.
I like the chorus
In this review:
"The man-boy has nothing (more) to say/
He’s stuck raging in his own real life Groundhog Day/
Doomed to write the same two songs in perpetuity/
Desperate to revisit the heights of his debut."
Good stuff!
Think
I might have been slightly off with the "gradually diminishing returns" part... :-I
Shame...
Highly Evolved - 8
Winning Days - 6
Vision Valley - 5
And having listened to this new one a few weeks ago, I'd say that 2 is about right. Some of it is just plain embarrassing.
2 out of 10 seems harsh
come on that would mean the sonic equivalent of recording a toilet flushing after a large satisfying dump and then releasing it as an album. Wouldn't it?
the toilet
flush has texture and mood, an organic liquid soundscape at just 23 seconds long, a punk masterpiece really
The vines used to be my favourite band when i was 17.
i used to love them
Can anyone think of any more bands who have gone downhill such as the vines, i mean i dont think its their fault. Sometimes when the need to write somethin heartfelt is gone then the talent disappears as well. It was the heart that kept them strong, alive. And its the heart that has gone.So their music, is dead.
at least
they'll always have a home in the background of a home and away scene.
this must've been hard to write
i mean, if an infant scrawled on me in permanent marker i wouldn't review it, so why extend the same courtesy to this?
me too....
doesn't sound so promising for this one though
Always very shit
live too.
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