After last week’s gratuitous abuse of Canada, shame compels me to leave off jokes about eleven months of snow and one of bad sledding and the like. Purely coincidentally, after Miriam Jones’ rather fine jazzy pop effort, comes fellow Canuck Jonathan Seet’s impeccably-produced tribute to all his favourite Brit bands.Yup, they’re all present and correct: The Cure, The Verve, The Bunnymen, Radiohead. Unfortunately, in many cases he’s latched onto the worst aspects of each group rather that the things that made them great. So instead of the sublime theatricality of The Cure, we have their cheesiest bass lines; instead of the melodic brilliance of Radiohead, we have their adolescent po-facedness, and instead of The Bunnymen’s era-defining creativity, we have their haircut.
That’s not to say that there are no good songs on this plodding, over-long album, but you have to be selective. Whilst opener ‘A Million Hungry Eyes’ borrows a good deal from ‘The Killing Moon’, with it’s strong piano-led intro and twangy, reverberating guitar, it certainly displays Seet’s impressive vocal range and ability to craft a clever pop melody. His voice is pleasing but characterless, as healthy and featureless as a Saskawatchan prairie and his freeze-dried production owes more to MOR hack Jeff Lynn than the indie genius of someone like Joy Division’s Martin Hannett. His lyric targets are obscure: I think this one might be about the cult of celebrity and leads to a redundant coda with Seet endlessly intoning “Quiet on the Set, Take 1″. This adds a minute to a song that should be done in three and a half. Seet might be a solid writer but he’s a bad editor: like the album, this song is too long.
Following on is ‘Just Try’ a blander version of what we’ve just heard, and then we have the first fair-dinkum steal from Oxford’s finest: ‘Come On’ ‘s lead guitar intro is that of ‘No Surprises’ minus all of the danger and edge of that nihilistic masterpiece, and the rest of the song is middle-ranking Electric Light Orchestra. ‘Killing All My Friends’ is much better: it combines Paul McCartney’s melodic sophistication with Richard Ashcroft’s lonesome balladeer shtick to good effect. The chorus is the thing: despite a major tautology (“You’re my alibi, undercover spy”, as opposed to the sort that go around with a bollard on their head saying, “Look Out! I’m a Spy”), it has a big, mighty melody that crushes cynicism, albeit temporarily.
Sadly, the record crashes into the ice floes with the next track. Seet has made an attempt at a mid-album pick-me-up, drawing on The Cure’s ‘Love Cats’, but instead of aping the Goth heroes, he’s gone and re-written ‘Save Your Kisses for Me’ by The Brotherhood of bloody Man! Maybe this is one for Radio 2. The slump continues with the offensively titled ‘Fashion Tips for the Homeless’, a self-pitying acoustic stomp, but is arrested by ‘Watching You Sleep’ a restless but intriguing piece of electronica which reminds me slightly of the Longpigs’ ‘Franck Sonata’. Here, and on the grooving, beat-laden closer ‘End of The Tape’, Seet’s music starts to acquire a spark of individuality and even modernity.
To close then, Seet has shown himself on all thirteen tracks (yes, I counted them all!) to be a professional-sounding songwriter and craftsman, but in Oxford that won’t be enough. He must wean himself off this habit of trying to sound alternately like every British band there ever was, and instead trust his own talent to write songs that sound like Jonathan Seet’s work, rather than a painstaking pastiche. I want to listen to works of art, not trawl through some hoser’s stamp collection.