"Sexteen" is a concept album, and it's a concept album about sex. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for discussing sex in a musical format, it is, after all, one of the rawest, most basic of human drives. Sex has been extensively explored though music, sculpture, literature, and pretty much every form of art that there is. Some of this exploration is profound and deep, most of it is a tacky, designed to appeal to the senses, like those Kirk/Spock gay fanfics that I ran across once. Yum.

Turning an album about sex into a profoundly unsexy experience though, there's something that takes some doing. Last Caress (sort of) did it for me, as do a fair few Xiu Xiu tracks. This album doesn't achieve its unsexiness through making disturbing or shocking statements, but simply through its sheer weight of naïveté. It's like listening to a ten-year-old cousin frankly discussing his sexual exploration with other girls.

Still, this whole experiment might not have gone awry if the band had not chosen funk as the vehicle for their explorations. Not only is it a pretty clichéd way of going about things, the band are held back by the fact that they're really not that good as putting together a good funk groove. The guitarwork would be more at home on some lo-fi indie rock record (which, I'm informed, is what Home are more or less noted for), and the vocals are just terrible, butchering songs that otherwise might be perfectly acceptable.

Speaking of vocals, the lyrics in places verge on the terrible. "Take me in/Swallow me whole/Do you wanna feel my fingers go inside of your hole?". Uhh... yeah, you'll excuse me if that doesn't get my juices flowing. It's not titillating, it's sure as hell not profound, so what [i]is the point to this music?

Or maybe that's the problem - there doesn't seem to be a point to a lot of the music here. The album winds its way through one plodding funk abortion after another, blundering into lyrical disaster after lyrical disaster. There are some occasional moments of reprieve, like the chiming Driving, but given the nineteen-song tracklist here, they're few and far between.

Apart from the hilariously awful lyrics that make me want to rush out and have sex about as much as waking to find a masked serial rapist wielding a chainsaw standing above my bed, there is a few good signs here. The band clearly have talent, and if they were putting together an album that doesn't stumble around a theme that's been done thousands of time before; they might have a bit more success. Unfortunately though, the subject matter, and the very vanilla way in which it's addressed, makes this album a bit like my last boyfriend was in bed: a dud.