What We're Listening To

REVIEW
Just stop already. We're at album number seven now, and we're still hearing the same one-note-deal from the 'Phonics.

Maybe somewhere there's a Dorian Gray-style picture of Kelly Jones which is pushing back the boundaries of rock, but on this plane of existence there are continents that have made more progress than the Welsh act since we heard A Thousand Trees in 1997.

That's not to say they're not popular. Not at all.

The Stereophonics have dutifully justified the existence of cultural treasures like V Festival for years, playing the same humming-and-screaming pat-a-cake routine to people whose musical epiphany involved mumbling "oooh" at something they heard in a coffee shop. Before going back to thinking about car insurance.

This year, PR drones fed us the old guff about "upping the bar". What follows is Innocent, an upbeat tippy-tappy radio ditty that's so monotonously familiar you can feel your heart stopping. Could You Be The One is a "slow one" from the "Bluffer's Guide To Slow Ones", Beerbottle adds pulse beats to a cliche, and She's Alright is drive-time which is so sub-Clapton that it's muffled by a vast geological layer of apathy.

Fans will probably love it, but for the rest the album title is starting to sound like a threat.