Here’s a review of the forthcoming album from Morden’s Good Shoes from guest reviewer NM:

On the final track of No Hope, No Future, Good Shoes’ Rhys Jones laments ‘Now I’m older I worry about being young and being so unsure’; it’s a sentiment that seems more pervasive on the band’s sophomore LP than it should be. Opener “The Way My Heart Beats” begins with the type of confident, urgent riffing that shot through their debut Think Before You Speak but the album as a whole feels at best non-committal and at worst prosaic. It strikes without conviction, neither carrying off its varied themes from lost love to disillusionment with the 21st century nor providing weighty enough tunes to hide lyrical flaws.

On Think Before You Speak songs such as “Small Town Girl” and “Never Meant to Hurt You” tapped into an indie-pop-new-wave evocation of XTC and the like, humming with a certain immediacy and vitality. While still angular and racing, such verve is missing this time around as new single “Under Control” harnesses a Foalsian thrust but can never quite translate it into something greater than a sum of its parts. “It Moves a Thousand Miles an Hour” feels, if you’ll excuse the terminology, pedestrian and directionless as a single refrain is webbed around meandering fretwork, while “I Know” is all hamfisted preaching (‘How can one be equal and another just be cast aside?’) and agit-pop-lite (‘I think that if there’s a day of judgement then our leaders will be the first against the wall’).

Youthful exuberance papered over the cracks on their earlier work but it appears time and experience hasn’t done Good Shoes any favours.

MP3s:
The Way My Heart Beats
Under Control

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