Most of the time, I carry the fact that I was born and raised in Brisbane proudly. I really like the river city, be it perving on girls at Southbank beach, or perving on girls in the Queen Street mall, or pervi... okay, I think you get the picture. But there are times that I keep the place of my birth and residence secret, and those times generally revolve around the topic of George being brought up.

You see, George are a band that desperately, desperately want to be relevant. They're frantic about it, they need to be respected and politely applauded by their peers. The problem is, at the core of it, they're a bunch of pretentious art-school kids who market their music primarily to people who like to think of themselves as sophisticated, educated, and cultured. I've got to hand it to them, I never thought the market for that sort of music was as big as it was, because George have made a habit of selling a lot of albums. The problem is, with their first album "Polyserena", and this new album, to a lesser extent, once you strip away the trendiness and pretension away from the music, there's just a bunch of mediocre folk-rock songs inside.

Quite possibly, the impediment to George actually meaning something lies in Katie Noonan, quite possibly the most horrific female voice in popular music today. Sounding like a cross between a seagull being strangled with piano wire, and chalk being scraped against a blackboard in an echo chamber, her vocals are again layered across this music like watery gravy across a cheap RSL roast dinner. This is displayed to dismaying effect on songs like Still Real, where Katie's screeching vocals completely obliterate everything else in the song.

However, this album isn't quite as much of an atrocity as "Polyserena", for the simple reason that while Katie Noonan is still as awful as ever, the songs led by Tyrone Noonan have been kicked up a notch. Tracks like One show that beneath the slick veneer of self-importance, there is a decent band lurking under there than can churn out a decent song when they put their mind to it.

Ultimately, this is pretty much standard for a release from George, all style, and absolutely no substance to speak of. Brisbane's wanna-be cultural elité will probably hate me for saying it, but deep down, they know it's true.