Supergrass - Rebel In You

Oh Supergrass, what have you done? Or more accurately, what haven’t you done? As soon as the stadium ‘rawk’ guitar blares out of the speakers to open the once fresh-faced, silver-tongued foursome’s new single ‘Rebel in You’ a sinking feeling settles.

The rest of the track plods on and we are damningly rewarded with yet more of what Supergrass have always done but watered down. It’s hard to spot the similarities between the band that wrote the edgy and cool ‘Caught By The Fuzz’ and, more recently, the madly careering ‘Never Done Nothing Like That Before’. Where once Supergrass were masters of catchy, clever pop songs they now seem to have opted for the ill-advised combination of uninspiring, over-long guitar solos, choruses repeated to the point of exasperation and ‘ooohs’ to fill out an otherwise painfully thin melody. The only real change seems to be Gaz Coombes’ new bizarre penchant for David Bowie style vocals with lots of over-pronounced vowels.

If this was a band just starting out it would be possible to be impressed by this offering but coming from a group who’ve been in the business over a decade now and who have already proven their song-writing capabilities many times over, ‘Rebel In You’ just smacks of laziness.