18 Wheeler - Year Zero
18 Wheeler’s newly-released effort is a sharp contrast to their previously-released dull trad indie efforts. Presumably the intention was to fuse exciting dubby beats and the best of electronic effects with their usual guitar pop, much the same as their Creation stable-mates The Boo Radleys did in their spectacular magnum opus Giant Steps. Here the comparisons end - while the Boos’ album was a majestic, sweeping and original trip into a unique, beautiful and magical world, ‘Year Zero’ is annoyingly mundane and, to put it simply, pants.
While listening to this CD one gets a sense of what the obviously very ambitious but severely limited boys of ‘Wheeler were intending. The odd flash of a smart guitar effect or thumping beats appear - perhaps here and there an echo of the dreaminess of The Beach Boys. Then they somehow manage to throw whatever little they had away, usually with some trite lyrics and poor delivery. One of the most outstandingly pathetic couplets is on Prozac Beats where the lead singer merrily croons "doctor give me a pill/because I feel so ill" so many times that you want to smash his face in with something big, heavy and preferably covered in spikes. Quite why ‘Wheeler and other Scottish bands (eg. Teenage Fanclub) want to sound like whiny Americans is a mystery to me. Perhaps when our charts were dominated by records from the land of mediocrity, but now when Britpop rules the airwaves and it is generally accepted (at last) that anything they can do, we can completely ignore and do something much better?
This album does get better with time, however. Initially the puerile lyrics and crap hooks irritate and grate on the nerves, but after a few listens their amazing tediousness disappears as the dullness takes over and it slips thankfully into the background noise where it can be forgotten. Mercifully I will never have to listen to this steaming pile of Britpoop ever again. Thank the stars. This album only got the marks it did for sounding, occasionally, like The Beach Boys to some minuscule degree. Again, I can not emphasise how painfully toilet this is.(2)
Gabrie
