Did somebody say the E word? Well perhaps branding TERN with the ‘emo’ tag is doing them (or the genre, whatever way you want to look at it) a bit of an injustice, but the way the first couple of songs on this demo go about presenting their feelings has something resolutely over-egged about it, or at least has a bitter edge than may not be wholly justifiable. Not that the latter would necessarily make proceedings particularly objectionable, but the way that over half of this demo has stylings not dissimilar to hoary American rock outfits like Nickelback and Puddle Of Mudd certainly does. Not nice.

Having said that, some of the tracks here are reasonably promising, with the metallic riffs on ‘Sleeping Awake’ being actually rather exciting and the intro to ‘Bigbadbill’ coming on like a poppier relative to Foo Fighters’s ‘One By One’ or Reuben’s ‘Let’s Stop Hanging Out’. In both cases, however, they are spoiled somewhat by the arrival of sub-Kurt vocals and the insistence of dragging it out for the full three-to-four minutes. Oh well.

“Just crawl back to your dirty hole / Swallow self-pity, take control” strains the words of ‘You Owe Me’, to which your correspondent duly obliges. They’ve undoubtedly got something, but perhaps need to gain or display more of it. Keep going, you might rock mightily some day yet…