One of the first music reviews that ever appeared on Halo-17 was Lauren Harding-Healy's dissection of Ikara Colt's "Chat and Business". At the time, she considered it a nice enough, if slightly uneven, collection of art-punk, with a few tracks showing that the band had considerable promise. Album number two shows the London band playing with a few new ideas, revealing a few new tricks, and building on the sound of their first album, without making any radical, sweeping changes.

The band still wears their influences on their sleeves. Elements of the usual suspects when it comes to British indie music are still present, you can hear bits of Joy Division and The Fall in the mixture here. However, the band also tempers the British sound of these influences with some sounds from American bands like Sonic Youth, the result being that the album almost sounds as if it's coming from a group of anglophile New York hipsters.

Without a doubt, the finest moment on "Modern Apprentice" is the massive, riff-based I'm With Stupid, a gigantic slab of post-punk noise and energy that manages to knock your socks off with the force of a small nuclear explosion, all in under three minutes. Almost as good is Motorway, built around some strangely distorted synthesisers and backed up by some female vocals that are as dry as a martini belonging to James Bond.

Some other decent tracks on the album include opening tune Wanna Be That Way, which probably owes the biggest debt on this album to Sonic Youth. Modern Feeling is another nice, fuzzy electro outing, and Automatic abandons the small shreds of restraint and subtlety that the band exhibit elsewhere on this album, and pummels the listener with wave upon wave of pure sound.

The only doubt I have about this album lies in the charisma and pulling power that it's going to have. Certainly, it's a good album, and certainly, it deserves to be heard, but this album just doesn't have that intangible quality to it that will make it huge. Still, despite it's short runtime, it's nothing at all to be ashamed of, and based on this and their previous album, I'll definitely be hanging out to hear album number three from these guys.