"...Someone else has already said it better and you can’t top that - steal from them and go out strong” - well, indeed. Or, as Virgin Suicides would put it in the cd which opens with the above sample, 'Plough Over the Bones of the Dead'. This defiantly derivative 4-track ep has no room whatsoever for subtlety - if you know you’re right, why be discrete about it? More a statement of intent than a collection of songs, this record is a cut’n’paste of quotations, high ambitions and a determined self belief [in other words, it sounds like the Manics - ed.]. And underneath the sprawl and mess are the hints of tunes which you can almost imagine singing along to, a taste of substance to back up the style which means that acoustic final track, 'Beyond 13', with its tuneful aching doesn’t seem as surprising as it might after the full force flat-out adrenaline punk-rock onslaught that precedes it. And the conclusion this begs you to reach is that an originality of ideas needn’t be so important as the force and drive behind those ideas. And if you believed in it when someone else used it then why shouldn’t you believe it and mean it just as much and more when you co-opt it, put your own spin on it and turn it to your own use? VS have a rock-solid belief in what they stole to be, and such feelings breed momentum...