Music > Album Reviews

The Heartbreaks // Funtimes

08/08/12

Release Date: 7th May 2012 

The Heartbreaks – Funtimes (Nusic Sounds)

Could this be the new McFly?

Hailing from Morecambe in Lancashire, for pop rockers, The Hearbreaks this is their debut album ‘Funtimes’ and it was produced by the very legendary Edwyn Collins, but I am afraid that is where the coolness and credibility pretty much starts and finishes. As I repeatedly listen to the album I am pleading with myself to please put the brakes on as I am being driven to distraction or at least press the mute button?

Like an over stocked rock shop in peak summer, it is packed to the ceiling with overdoses of jingly, jangly sparkly cheesy grin pop nonsense.

It is stuck in a time warp somewhere before and between Leicestershire’s Diesel Park West and America’s The Gigolo Aunts, (but it really is even not half as good as either of those bands were, in their day) the whole album sounds like they are all on helium during the recording; it’s all far too fast, frantic and repetitive, resulting in them creating a real marshmallow of a sound of all things that are far too sugary and all so very, very sickly sweet.

Chiming, rhyming, melodic in your face aggravating over indulgent pop nonsense at its very worst. It is a regurgitated sound of all things bad from the sixties through to the eighties.

Lead singer, Matthew Whitehouse has apparently been compared to Elvis Costello and one Stephen Morrissey (really?)! To their credit they have also previously toured in recent times with Morrissey and Hurts and in total they have played to crowds of over two hundred thousand people across Europe.

This could be big in Eastern Europe and or with the under sixteen teenage girl population in the UK? But for me as you may have gathered by now it is all rather turgid and ever so slightly boring.

‘Funtimes’, I think not! Enough!

3/10 Steve Plunkett