Laurel Collective - Feel Good Hits Of A Nuclear Winter

are undeniably good to listen live, because they like being on stage and make you dance. However, when listening to their album the weakness of their music is blatant: not original in the slightest, repetitive and hiding a lack of depth behind the nice surface.

Yet, the album’s title, ‘Feel Good Hits Of A Nuclear Winter’, announces a bitter irony, a sense of sarcasm and of distance. Alas, you just get the feel good hits with their sick-sad-world teenage waffle. Okay, it’s really nice of them to offer us nice tunes to feel good. And it works. Nothing to complain about, then? Well, it’s just somewhat boring, sometimes, to listen to the same nice multicultural pop-rock all over the country. And even though you are in a good mood and do not ask for more than summer hits, weariness will get you before you reach the end of the CD. It’s a bit like treacle tart: not bad, but enough is enough.

Opening track, ‘International Love Affair’, is a bit too cold, in its romantic vocals, to be appealing. Happily, ‘Gun Mouth’ is much more exciting: these tribal drums are actually the Laurel Collective’s most interesting discovery, and are felicitously used again in ‘Billion Planets’. They transform an electro taste (that is, the true post-structuralist, hence post-modern, sound) in the most primitive music, looping the loop. This ‘Billion Planets’ is actually one of the best tracks, a nice piece of disco music starting with a headlong rush which ends, more conventionally, with a few chanted lines, like in their single ‘Vuitton Blues’.

The rest of the album goes from missed Beatles melancholy to retro folk romanticism, the two singers displaying their honeyed vocals with much conviction. These guys have spent too much time listening to The Strokes, The Shins and The Go! Team, and maybe not quite enough wondering what they would like to say. Every track is made to be a possible hit: precisely between 3’ and 4’30” minutes, with a rhythm you can dance on effortlessly. That’s enough to get the ‘Vuitton Blues’ indeed: it smacks of marketing exactly as much as the ugly Vuitton bags.