It's a giant freaking ball of yarn

Guillemots – Red [2008]

There’s got to be some limits to the notion that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Having endured Guillemots second album, Red, five too many times, I can confirm that one of those limits is a cover photo that features a giant freaking ball of yarn in some kind of corrugated iron tunnel road. It doesn’t help that the yarn is, you guessed it, red, just like the album title. It’s fucking yarn. Seriously.

Guillemots are the musical equivalent of a United Colors of Benetton billboard, featuring a cast of musicians from three continents with funky-ass names like Fyfe Dangerfield and MC Lord Magrao who play lots of instruments, have lots of sex with teenage groupies and, you can only assume, have perfect Colgate smiles and black, black hearts. Red is overproduced, earnest and saccharine – in short, sickening – the kind of record you’d catch your mum secretly adding to her ipod shuffle for those lonely Tuesday afternoons of self-loathing on the treadmill.

Don’t believe me? Download “Cockateels” and when those syrupy strings rise 80 seconds through and Fyfe sings “Cuz deeeeeeealing with the real world/Is sometimes not too fun/When baby says she loves you/Whilst holding up her gun”, just see if you can keep your lunch down.

Dangerfield’s lyrics provide a pretty good microcosm of how craptastic Red is overall. Oblige me another quote, this one from masturbatory lamefest “Standing on the Last Star”: “So Cinderella sold her soul/There’s no such thing as rock n roll/We all stood in the queue and sold our hearts”. There’s so many layers of crapness in these three lines, thinking about it too much is like peeling a rotten onion. And these are just three of dozens of rotten lines to be found on Red.

But it’s not just the lyrics. With their debut, Guillemots proved that they are actually capable of penning a decent tune (see “Trains to Brazil”), but on Red the band is out of ideas. The solution, it seems, was to drench the whole thing in super-slick production and turn the bells and whistles up to 11. The problem is that underneath all the guff, the songs suck.

The Verdict: 3 rotten onions: