As pop music sales continue to take a bigger percentage share of the UK market, and rock music, particularly Indie rock is becoming as lifeless as The Sahara desert in need of Oasis, hopes are high that Tynesiders Detroit Social Club will have the invention and ammunition to grab the mettle and return a set of songs that will wake the dying beast and resurrect some of the respect and vitality the genre has delivered over the past thirty years. Sadly, for all their big noise bluster, far from sounding like the music of tomorrow, their debut album “Existence” seems firmly set in a hopelessly generic world pitched somewhere between The Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” and Kasabian’s “Cutt Off”. Their lad rock, string drenched “anthems” have all the out dated monotony of a night in with nothing on TV and a clutch of Embrace albums for company.
One wonders who singer David Burn wants to be. On opener “Kiss The Sun” he opts for the Liam Gallagher drawl and backed by a sound that Serge Pizzorno has fashioned countless times, sets the album off to a clumsy start. “Northern Man” is Burn’s attempt to recreate a Brit rock sound that quite frankly died about ten years ago. His Richard Ashcroft stylized vocal, liberally laden with yet more over bearing string accompaniment cries out for un-warranted attention. “Sunshine People” sees the singer mimicking Tom Meighan’s stoner philosophies as he laconically blurts “Let the rain wash over me, I’m living with the sunshine people”. “Silver” takes a Stone Roses dance rhythm from 20 years ago and is probably the point at which even the hardiest listeners will declare themselves done with DSC. Overlaid with a monotone, tuneless vocal, one envisages that Burn is now beginning to sound as bored as the long suffering listener.
UK Indie rock is screaming out for a new Oasis. Sadly, Detroit Social Club are not the new Messiah’s. They’re just six Geordies jumping up and down in their own puddle of piss.
4/10
1 Kiss the Sun
2 Northern Man
3 Black and White
4 Chemistry
5 Sunshine People
6 River & Rainbows
7 Silver
8 Prophecy
9 Universe
10 Lights of Life
Northern Man
Kiss The Sun
