Miles Kane Colour Of The Trap

Dissapointment, eh? It’s not much fun is it? But if by some perverted twist of sanity you get off on the stuff, you’ve found your next fix, hooray! And it's with just such an awkwardly inverted frown that I’d like to introduce Miles Kane. Once frontman to the Rascals, he is perhaps best known for his work as one half of the Last of The Shadow Puppets alongside Alex Turner, a band that produced the excellent The Age of the Understatement. It is a shame then that The Colour Of The Trap, his solo debut, fails to fulfill expectations in spectacularly unemphatic fashion. It acts as a quiet parody of the all-pervading feeling that right now rock ‘n’ roll, whatever that may actually mean, is all but dead and buried.

Perhaps that’s a lot of pressure to lump on one album, but in October I heard Inhaler for the first time; with that bold bumping bassline, crashing drums, snarling vocals, knife edge riff and surging guitar solo full of fuzz and buzz and movement, it was and is lovely. However, it does little to exonerate the criminally indifferent response that this album will manage to provoke in its audience. It seems one excellent single has managed only to taint the album with the weight of expectation.

Let us reflect for a minute. In many ways there are positives across this record; the issue is that they are just spread so evenly that the complete article eventually finds itself quite simply drowning in its own uninspiring pleasantry. It does draw on an enjoyably variant array of sounds: from the tidal, melodic swells on the likes of My Fantasy and Take The Night From Me, through the languid pop-rock energy and backing vocals of Quicksand, right up to the seductively entwined duet on Happenstance; however, they each consistently fail to develop the whole. Almost without exception it seems this album delivers good but never great: and, when you put it like that, its clear that ‘good’ is not good enough.