Foster the People - Supermodel

Foster The People’s Mark Foster has made it perfectly clear in the run-up to release that ‘Supermodel’ is “not the record that people are gonna expect”, and in that sense the band’s second full-length certainly delivers. The synthesised, catchy hooks devised by the former music jingle writer were the calling card of 2011’s ‘Torches’ but here, they’re few and far between. Similarly, while the globally chart-topping ‘Pumped Up Kicks’ was a song about teenage psychosis, there was no getting away from its light and breezy nature.

By contrast, this is an album that has been ushered in with ‘Coming of Age’ as its single. Precociously indicative of the step-change the band are hoping for, it’s already enough to make you think twice about pressing ahead. Doing so only makes you wish you hadn’t.

This departure from their earlier style has made them not more distinctive but instead, far more derivative. Railing against social conformity in a track like album opener ‘Are You What You Wanna Be’, only highlights how sanitised their music has come to feel, with the smart electronics and memorable bass that peppered their debut relegated to mediocre background production in an all-too-often flat and hollow musical landscape.

It’s also only made worse by those tracks that do stand out. Acoustic album closer ‘Fire Escape’ makes for a nice, genuinely reflective change, while ‘Best Friend’ and the terribly named ‘Pseudologica Fantastica’ actually seem capable of bringing together the elements that sit disparately throughout the rest of the album with a flash of the band’s former promise. But then those latter two tracks are punctuated by a pointless choral interlude called ‘The Angelic Welcome of Mr Jones’, and you can’t help think that like its namesake, this is an album that suffers from having altogether too much surface and not nearly enough substance.