The Strypes - Snapshot

Children dressed in suits are not cute. They’ don’t look ‘grown up’, they look creepy. Unless they’re off to a funeral or alternatively a court appearance, for pre-teens to look like the Blues Brothers gone Benjamin Button is, well, odd. And although The Strypes might well have seen through at least some of what puberty bestows, standing there in their strangely immaculate suits, bowl haircuts and whiskerless pout, they’re more like a strange seaside waxwork than a band.

Even weirder, maybe, is the idea that their retro-rock of the kind that sounds like it thinks Jet was a Really Good Idea, is supposed to be the antithesis of boyband worship. A queue of old rockers – Elton John, Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller included – have lined up to proclaim them ‘the future’. “A breath of fresh air”, John said, as if under-40s with both guitar and amplifier has become an alien concept to the middle-aged.

The irony, of course, is that ‘Snapshot’ is more derivative than what is is supposed to be an alternative to. ‘Mystery Man’ opens the album with a sound that’s more polished than most of McFly’s early stuff, ‘Blue Collar Jane’ sounds in places like the theme to Only Fools and Horses, and ‘What The People Don’t See’ is pure #ladsinsuits. And when taking on a cover – Bo Diddley’s ‘You Can’t Judge A Book By The Cover’ a case in point – it’s more ‘passable wedding band’ than ‘new generation blues’.

And those suits, it must be said, are worn far better by their reality TV counterparts. Now, where’s that One Direction CD?