Here at Halo-17, our usual policy is to ignore completely the press kits and label-issued hype that comes with new albums. Usually, these press kits are nothing but a pack of absolute lies, expertly designed by marketing people to cover up lacklustre albums and tired old ideas. Generally, the worse the album is, the more positive the hype is. However, looking at the press hype for Lawn, I will admit that it did sound enticing. "Mogwai with vocals", it said to me. Given that I rather like Mogwai, I was expecting epic soundscapes forged with ringing guitars, with the added bonus of having some lyrics thrown in.

Boy, was I disappointed. About the only similarities that Lawn have with Mogwai is that they are both from Europe, and they are both overly reliant on the guitar to forge their sound. But where Mogwai play up to their strengths, with immaculately constructed pieces that set fire to your imagination, Lawn are a painfully generic alt-rock band with very few new ideas, and a seeming determination to stay right in the middle of the pack.

Apart from the cover-art, which is quite nice in an obtuse sort of way, there is nothing particularly good about this band. Sure, there are a couple of decent tunes that I wouldn't turn off if they came on the radio, but I'd be hard-pressed to select a favourite tune off here. For instance, the opening track Tide, starts off with a drum-roll, and quickly moves into a fuzzy, twisted riff, before dropping to a much more subdued sound for the verse. When the chorus rolls around, the same riff starts blasting away in the background again, with close to zero variation. This soft verse/loud chorus technique has been utilised by pretty much everyone, including Nirvana, Pearl Jam and The Smashing Pumpkins, and it's tired cliché use here might have been excusable here if Tide had anything else going for it. Unfortunately, a mediocre riff and some mumbled, incoherent lyrics don't make a gripping song.

Fix starts off a lot better, with a double-headed male/female vocal, but again, generic riffery and uninspiring song structure drag it down until it becomes yet another boring rock song. Winter is a plodding affair that goes on for about three minutes longer than it should do. The requisite ballad track arrives precisely where you'd expect in the form of the morose Mercury. Even the age-old trick of hiding an extra song after a long silence in the last track doesn't add much life to proceedings, both the "official" closer, Neon and the secret track don't hold a lot of interest.

I don't know whether I might have been a bit easier on this band had I not seen their promotional material. After all, the band probably didn't have anything to do with the hype; they're probably just concerned with the music. But getting my hopes up by promising Mogwai to me left me feeling disappointed by the time that "Backspace" had finished playing. A stock-standard rock album from what seems to be a stock-standard rock band.

Here at Halo-17, our usual policy is to ignore completely the press kits and label-issued hype that comes with new albums. Usually, these press kits are nothing but a pack of absolute lies, expertly designed by marketing people to cover up lacklustre albums and tired old ideas. Generally, the worse the album is, the more positive the hype is. However, looking at the press hype for Lawn, I will admit that it did sound enticing. "Mogwai with vocals", it said to me. Given that I rather like Mogwai, I was expecting epic soundscapes forged with ringing guitars, with the added bonus of having some lyrics thrown in.

Boy, was I disappointed. About the only similarities that Lawn have with Mogwai is that they are both from Europe, and they are both overly reliant on the guitar to forge their sound. But where Mogwai play up to their strengths, with immaculately constructed pieces that set fire to your imagination, Lawn are a painfully generic alt-rock band with very few new ideas, and a seeming determination to stay right in the middle of the pack.

Apart from the cover-art, which is quite nice in an obtuse sort of way, there is nothing particularly good about this band. Sure, there are a couple of decent tunes that I wouldn't turn off if they came on the radio, but I'd be hard-pressed to select a favourite tune off here. For instance, the opening track Tide, starts off with a drum-roll, and quickly moves into a fuzzy, twisted riff, before dropping to a much more subdued sound for the verse. When the chorus rolls around, the same riff starts blasting away in the background again, with close to zero variation. This soft verse/loud chorus technique has been utilised by pretty much everyone, including Nirvana, Pearl Jam and The Smashing Pumpkins, and it's tired cliché use here might have been excusable here if Tide had anything else going for it. Unfortunately, a mediocre riff and some mumbled, incoherent lyrics don't make a gripping song.

Fix starts off a lot better, with a double-headed male/female vocal, but again, generic riffery and uninspiring song structure drag it down until it becomes yet another boring rock song. Winter is a plodding affair that goes on for about three minutes longer than it should do. The requisite ballad track arrives precisely where you'd expect in the form of the morose Mercury. Even the age-old trick of hiding an extra song after a long silence in the last track doesn't add much life to proceedings, both the "official" closer, Neon and the secret track don't hold a lot of interest.

I don't know whether I might have been a bit easier on this band had I not seen their promotional material. After all, the band probably didn't have anything to do with the hype; they're probably just concerned with the music. But getting my hopes up by promising Mogwai to me left me feeling disappointed by the time that "Backspace" had finished playing. A stock-standard rock album from what seems to be a stock-standard rock band.