The Vines- Melodia (Cooking Vinyl/Ivy League)

It’s hard to believe The Vines were thought of as highly as the bands who came to prominence around the same time; White Stripes and The Strokes in particular.

Their Highly Evolved debut showed glimpses of promise but since, they’ve wholeheartedly failed to live up to that promise. Theirs has been a turbulent career so far, admittedly. With frontman Craig Nicholls being diagnosed as autistic and having to learn how to deal with it, it’s a wonder an album has emerged at all. If writing decent new songs has indeed been a struggle for Nicholls, frankly, it shows. If this is him in reinvigorated mode, he’s been plain lazy; taking inspiration from your (and everyone else’s) favourite albums does not constitute a vigorous re-stirring of creative juices.

Not many Australian bands have broken through the mainstream with anything particularly original to present, most of them being box-ticking, derivative good time rock-mongers. Vines also offer nothing new and don’t seem to know what they want to be, instead playing around with tired rock formulae. On this album, they often come across as an Aussie take on (and therefore a dumber, more cliché-ridden version of) Ash’s chart-bothering power-pop prowess. And then they pepper the album with attempts at sounding like, well, just about every other student-bop mainstay.

When not in snotty, racket-making Stones-go-punk mode, they’re aping The Beatles’ whimsical pop with the waltz-time fluffiness of ‘True Is The Night’. Then, quite shamelessly, having a go at playing ‘being Nirvana’ on the next track. Album closer, ‘She Is Gone’ could be a weak-limbed Oasis B-side (way to plagiarise the plagiarists!) while ‘Merry-Go-Round’ and ‘Orange Amber’ have the weak drabness of tra-la-la Britpop, the former with an ‘80s-metal chorus inexplicably cut and pasted in between the verses. Its 14 songs barely stretch past the half-hour, too, with most songs hovering around the 2-minute mark, further suggesting the scorching antipodean sun has perhaps led to a debilitating ideas famine, ‘round the Vines’ way.

It all comes across like a particularly adept covers band doing songs you vaguely think you’ve heard before somewhere. It’s all fairly well presented but there’s nothing that will have you eagerly anticipating repeated listens.

In fact, it’s more ‘old hat’ than the hat Catherine Howard was wearing when Henry VIII had her beheaded. Sorry, my mind is wandering. This album isn’t helping matters at all.