News / / 25.04.13

HURTS

EXILE (Epic)

2/20

Hurts are about as gothic as Nicky Minaj and no amount of monochrome press shots, blood or song titles like The Crow, The Rope and Sandman are going to convince us this whole black charade hasn’t been dreamed up in the bowels of some record company high-rise. As they expel the lines “your broken headlamp lights your path to God” on The Road, the fact these two clowns are even attempting to impart any kind of evangelical wisdom is just downright insulting. The pompous stadium wank of single Miracle sounds like wacky Mylo Xyloto-era Coldplay, and the only thing that stops Somebody To Die For sounding like it’s plucked straight from the X Factor studio is the absence of a bunch of tasteless fuckwits giving it a round of applause at the end. The Rope sounds exactly the same until some bizarre rave sirens add a little Swedish House Mafia into the mix. But it’s the incessantly pseudo-prophetic lyrics that really wear you down. It reeks of a band trying to appeal to a base level audience who want to buy into a grand theme but can’t see past the front cover. Exile is the sound of a band plying 14 over-produced versions of Ultravox’s Vienna, and its inevitable success is nothing short of a travesty.

 

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Words: Thomas Frost

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