Review Summary: Think you love Radiohead’s ‘The Bends’? Not half as much as these dudes...
The older you get the harder it becomes to make definitive ‘best ever’ statements, even things that used to make you feel like your eyeballs were popping out with pleasure have their impact lessened through familiarity; exclamations like ‘wow, what you were doing down there was incredible, I’ve never felt such pleasure in all my life’ eventually replaced by maybe an appreciative grunt. It’s the same with music, long gone are the days when twice a week you’d claim ‘this is the most amazing music I’ve heard in my entire life’, the closest you get now is something scaled back to the level of ‘that’s the best Bolivian chamber pop concept album about a constipated waiter named Juan Pablo I’ve heard this month’. After years and years of listening to music for something to grab you as truly definitive is quite momentous... sound the horns and grab the nearest town crier for in ‘Heroes & Villains’ Paloalto have provided me with just such a rare opportunity.
Fear not, as the rating above would suggest I haven’t totally lost it; I’m not about to proclaim this album the best of anything. No, what Paloalto have claimed is the far less coveted title of MOST DERIVATIVE ALBUM I’VE EVER HEARD.
Yes a competitive field I know, but hear me out, this is the first album I’ve listened to that truly sounds like the result of splicing three other albums together with next to nothing new brought to the table at all. ‘Heroes & Villains’ is quite the Frankenstein’s monster, sounding like a carefully assembled selection of off cuts taken from ‘The Bends’, ‘Showbiz’ and ‘The Man Who’; the quality of this experiment is remarkable as you really can’t hear the joins. The songs themselves are actually fine hence the 2.5 rating, something else experience teaches is that there are far worse crimes than being derivative, but beyond being reasonably well written they have little else to offer.
Tradition dictates that a review should now drill down into further detail but in this case it would be a pointless exercise; if you like the idea of those three albums mashed up then you’ll like this, if not then this has absolutely nothing to offer you.
Silencio.
