On paper, The Donnas should be a great band. Hot chicks, churning out grinding rock songs with influences from 70s psychedelia to The Ramones should be a good thing. I'm not quite sure why "Gold Medal" is such a trainwreck then, because all of the ingredients are quality. Nevertheless, the only place that this train is going is Blandsville, population: The Donnas.

The cover of this album tells you virtually all that you need to know about "Gold Medal" as an album. It's a floral mess complete with 70s-style portraits of the band, looking like something that might actually have been made 30 years ago. However, placed with a whole bunch of other stuff from that decade, it wouldn't stand out, and it'd fade into the background. The music is essentially similar, despite the band broadening their palette somewhat, this is still cookie-cutter music from the 70s, which would have been mediocre at the time, never mind thirty years later.

Compared to other albums, there's a lot less posturing, and far fewer songs that are fuelled entirely by the girls' sexuality. This is a pleasing development, because if the band were ever to be taken seriously in their own right, they needed to stop relying on the fact that they were an all-girl rock band - still a rarity in the industry today, and concentrate on their music. It even comes together on The Gold Medal, an interesting piece based on a thumping backbone with an acoustic guitar and piano based interlude right in the middle. It's a good piece, and one that establishes that the band do have the talent in them to come up with a good song.

Unfortunately, it's about the only ray of light in a very dark and stormy looking collection. Most of the rest of the songs simply rely on the tried-and-true combination of heavy guitar noise and laid-back, almost stoned-sounding vocals. It's never been a particularly energising or interesting combination, and even by the end of this short album, it begins to get tiresome. Dashes of stoner-rock and psychedelia are thrown in at predictable intervals, but they don't manage to do much more than to simply make the band sound like an inferior knockoff of Led Zeppelin or The Doors.

It feels bad to give "Gold Medal" a bad writeup, because one gets the impression that the band really tried to come up with something decent for this album. Unfortunately, old habits die hard, and the blandness and sloppy songwriting ("I may not be a man/but you're not one either/It takes one to know one") drag the album down. One great song out of eleven isn't a great ratio, and until The Donnas can come up with more than one song per album that isn't a ripoff of some other band's sound, they're not going to be winning any medals.