Athlete - Vehicles & Animals

I started listening to Vehicles & Animals with a certain amount of anticipation, hoping for the "next fab British band" to emerge from the speakers. But really, by the end of it, I was astonishingly bored. Athlete does what they do well enough, but they do it over, and over, and over...well, you get the point. I think the best way for me to describe the music Athlete makes is sort of "slacker British dude" music. It sort of rolls on with a thick accent and plodding stride - the kind of music that invokes the phrase, "If he were any more laid back, he'd be asleep." Does this make sense? I'll give them that the arrangement is quirky. Some of the sounds and rhythms that are in there are pretty unexpected and pretty cool, but they almost seem to be too contrived, not organic but part of a plot to pull one over on you. "El Salvador" is a decent, plucky opening song. Good melodies, good harmonies and interesting keyboard effects make it one of the best tracks on the album. And "Westside" is a great song, very compilation disc worthy. It has an early to mid-nineties sound. "One Million" suddenly turns from a virtual continuation of "Westside" into a bit of a techno tune, which is kind of different. "Out of Nowhere" is actually a really cool song with nice even vocals. It's got a good hook too that doesn't try to confuse to the point where you have to give up like many of the other tracks. By the final songs on the record, though, I've just lost interest, and they start to blend together. Joel Pott's mostly a-tonal, metronomic vocals begin to wear on me around the sixth track, "New Project." Maybe it's just a sound that I don't get. And sometimes I am not as frustrated by it as others, but generally, I just...can't...tolerate...the same...plodding...drone for too long. And despite the interesting music, that's when I usually turn the disc off. [www.athlete.mu]