Easyworld – This Is Where I Stand

I tried, honestly, to enjoy Easyworld‘s album This Is Where I Stand. My first impressions were of a rather run-of-the-mill indie-schmindie band, but apart from guessing the gender of the singer on the first couple of tracks, there was just nothing left to hold my attention. The whole thing just droned on like a million other unambitious records have since the first emaciated white boy struggled to overcome his apathy and strum a guitar.

Drone, drone, drone, on it goes, song after song, it just sounds like it was such an effort to record, and it certainly was an effort to listen to. It took five attempts to actually get past the first few songs. Not that they were earth-shatteringly bad, mind. They were competent enough, but bad songs are forgivable, and these were just dull – in the end a far graver crime.

Where’s the passion, the drama? At no point of listening to this album could I empathise with the band. At no point did I want to be in the band. At no point did they articulate something inside me. It was just jangle, jangle, moan, moan. This is a great time for music right now, we’ve got exciting, daring, inventive, clever, sexy bands coming out of our ears at the moment, bands that make me feel like a teenager again, bands that make me remember what it was like to be 15 or 16, and the rush of hearing bands like Nirvana for the first time, or dancing at a rave as the sun comes up and nothing else mattered but the music. Compared to this Easyworld sound as lifeless and stale as a Britpop b-side.

Only one track stands out, and that’s only because it produced a more negative reaction in me than all the others. The penultimate track You & Me sounds like some best-forgotten Menswear out-take. But what do I know. In an age when someone as dreary as Dido can go on to shift x billion amounts of CDs around the world, Easyworld’s bland version of indie pop could easily find favour.

Thankfully, the one redeeming feature of This Is Where I Stand is its anonymity. Once the CD stopped it left not a single trace on my mind. An utterly forgettable and unenjoyable experience.