The Vines - Vision Valley

Backlash, backlash, lets all have a backlash. It’s at times like this when DIY takes up its riot shield and faces the masses with a big wide grin. This new Vines album. It’s not a letdown. It’s not crap. It’s not ‘awful, just like we all expected’. In fact, it’s pretty bloody alright.

Cheap shots at easy targets are to be expected, obviously. But when you look at the arguments thrown at The Vines, they rarely, if ever, stand up. Sure, ‘Vision Valley’ isn’t the most artistically brilliant piece of music you’ll ever hear; it’s somewhere just north of the three minute pop song gone grunge. It does wear its influences on its sleeve, sounds as you may expect, and doesn’t want to challenge any boundaries. So what?

What you’re looking at is just over thirty minutes of proper summer pop music; an album for days in the garden with the sun out. The handclaps and sing-a-long chorus of ‘Anysound’ should be more than enough to prove there’s hook lines in them there hills, even without giving a band so close to the edge credit for coming back.

Craig Nicholls circa 2006 is, generally, a more controlled soul. For every screaming of 70 second buzz fest like ‘Gross Out’, there’s a blissed out psychedelic pop song to match. Title track ‘Vision Valley’ trips out over what sounds like the bastard child guitar line of ‘Karma Police’, and while ‘Fuk Yeh’ and ‘Futuretarded’ may not be the best titles you’ll ever hear for a song, the sheer positivity of ‘Don’t Listen To The Radio’ more than makes up for it.

‘Vision Valley’ isn’t a revelation in the career of The Vines, but it is a chance for the blinkers to come back off. Though ‘Winning Days’ contained one hell of a summer pop classic in the shape of its title track, a few bitter reviews and one (badly attributed) bad attitude sank it before it even got going. With a reformed frontman and some tunes to match, Nicholls deserves his second chance.