If you're like me, and I have a eerie feeling you probably are to some extent, you're half annoyed, half intrigued by the near constant flow of new post-punk pub bands who quantify themselves with the definite article "The" prefixing the noun of their name. The Strokes, The View, The Vines, The Bravery, The Futureheads, The Hives, The Killers, The Sounds, The Rapture, The Raveonettes....etc, etc, into infinity. Now this naming scheme is tried and true, I mean it basically went to the same pre-school as Rock itself, and I've no real problem with it aside from it's trendiness and current saturation. I liken it to the trend of the 90's where your band name was a noun followed by a random number (Blink 182, Eve 6, Sum 41, Stroke 9, et. al.) and it can wear a person out. Quickly.
However the ubiquitous "The" is not now, nor has it ever been, a deal breaker for me to listen to a band. Neither is their proverbial joy-ride on the pub-shoo-wop bandwagon. Hence when the iPod commercial came out with the catchy "ba-da-bap-ba-da-da-das" of "Flathead" by The Fratellis I found it honestly groovy. Yes they borrow from every soccer hooligan band with big black stomping boots ever, yes they sound like a lot of other bands out there at the moment but I hold them to the same standard I hold bands like Wolfmother and Interpol to; sure there were bands that did that sound historically and classically better, but this specific music is still "new". I mean if Interpol had released Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" in it's entirety then I could fault them for not being original, but the fact is no matter what they borrowed from their mentors they still put out unique tracks. So the Fratellis may have borrowed their sound from artists as distant as Elvis recent as Arctic Monkeys but they still put out an album of 12 original songs that they wrote all by themselves. And that's what this album is; 12 songs that sound like a lot of other music out there at the moment. If you put The Futureheads, Arctic Monkeys, The View and The Fratellis in a playlist and shuffled them while you were doing your laundry I don't think you'd ever notice the shift between bands. Not that their music is band, but it's just more of the same. So much of the same in fact that I won't even go into the specifics of this album track by track. Puffmagic gives The Fratellis 3.5 out of 5 Rob Gordons
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