Release Date 16th May – Armellodie Records.
Le Reno Amps are a band hailing from the Highlands of Scotland and new album ‘Appetite’ is their third offering. Their press release rather grandly claims that they ‘don’t buck trends, they start them and that ‘they have no time for the constraints of genre.’
The first song is so important on an album and sad to say that 'This One Is Not Waiting' is a rather weak start to the album. Like a song that was not good enough for a bad McFly album, it lacks any kind of finesse and doesn’t justify the praise on their press release.
Thankfully things look are looking up with the next two songs, Bad Blood and Never Be Alone, particularly the latter ‘Never Be Alone’, part Americana, part music hall, a song which asserts the belief that they have some interesting ideas about them.
One suspects that they have an old Lennon/McCartney type partnership going as there seems to be at least two separate writers with different ideas of how the band should sound. When Le Reno Amps sound full on in songs like 'Saturation' it doesn’t work as well as on more bluesy numbers like 'Sinners'. It is when they stop trying to go at a hundred miles an hour that the good ideas come to the fore. As a result their sound seems to be fighting against itself.
The ideas and the craft are there for Le Reno Amps, but not all their ideas are good ones. They just need to be a bit more ruthless when it comes to deciding which ideas work and which ones don’t.
5/10
Posted In Album Reviews, May 14 2011.
Words - The Ginger