The Sirens of Venice

Artist: The Sirens of Venice
Label: Speak n Spell / Inertia
Website: myspace.com/thesirensofvenice

This is a difficult album to properly review. On the one hand it’s a nice collection of pop ballads with some decent ideas and the charming premise of being fronted by a married couple. On the other hand it’s often quite bland, lacking in originality and the production, whilst sweeping and lush on first impression, comes across a bit cheap when put through high quality speakers or a good pair of headphones. What makes it particularly difficult to review however, is the inconsistency. Throughout the whole album the songs are very much hit and miss, on a couple of occasions I found myself wholly underwhelmed and really quite bored only to have to pause my scathing analysis when a particularly captivating tune started to lead in another direction. This inconsistency isn’t limited to the difference between songs either, even in the course of one track the music can drift from simple beauty to flawed cliche in just a few seconds.

The first song is baffling in its inclusion, it sets the scene badly and does no favours to our intrepid vocalist, then there’s a couple of songs in the first half of the album that sound as though Billy Corgan, Frank Black and Kim Real unexpectedly formed a grunge supergroup only to have a change of heart and decide to play softcore indie pastiches of their former work instead. And whilst we’re on the subject of musical doppelgangers there’s another tune that sounds like an awkward Richard Ashcroft tinkering around with Liam Gallagher on Garage Band in his bedroom as a teenager. This isn’t to say that it’s bad music, far from it, but without something dynamic and original to propel the sound it tends to wallow around in a sort of limbo of mediocrity.

This lack of direction belies the fact that there are some quite lovely moments to be found in this album, as previously mentioned there are sections in many of the songs that are almost bewitchingly charming and its a shame that these moments are lost amongst their unremarkable counterparts. In terms of a stand-out song, it must be said that 'Somewhere Under The Sea' is rather enjoyable in its entirety, even though vocalist Craig Jackson still sounds like painfully timid version of Corgan. Come to think of it the echoes of Grunge royalty are pretty much the only thing that beefs their sound up sufficiently to pass inspection.

You know that Toyota advert where customs do raids on things that are too soft for Australia? If not, don’t worry it’s dreadful. The point being that if The Sirens of Venice featured in that advert they’d be rumbled for attempting to disguise something kitten soft as something more much more substantial, subsequently causing the ersatz Toyota customs officers to have them destroyed on the spot. And so herein lies the problem, there’s no denying that Mr & Mrs Jackson have got skills and potential, not to mention that this would sound a lot better live with full band backing, but for the time being it seems like they’re still finding their feet and as such are afraid to properly experiment with their sound.

James Farrell