It's almost approached the level of cliché to compare Silversun Pickups to The Smashing Pumpkins. Sure, there's none of the Corganesque drama involved in their music, as far as I can tell their frontman Brian Aubert is all business rather than slagging off former band members on his blog, and by all accounts all members of the band get on fantastically. That hasn't stopped lazy music journalists comparing Aubert to Corgan at every opportunity though.

In a lot of ways though, Aubert and his band bring it upon themselves, because to be honest, this music does sound a lot like vintage Smashing Pumpkins, even moreso than their 2007 'reunion' album "Zeitgeist". Big riffs, fuzzy guitars, and ambiguous yet sincere sounding vocals are the order of the day here, and Silversun Pickups deliver them with even more style and depth than they did on their debut album.

Take the wonderfully fuzzy Panic Switch, for instance. The guitar is wrapped under a glorious layer of woolly, bristling distortion, complemented perfectly by a slinky bass riff that bubbles and writhes underneath the song's main riff. The Royal We also uses liberal amounts of fuzz, punctuated only by pained-sounding squeals of feedback from Aubert's guitar and a taut, skittish sounding string section. Both are tactics that have been used extensively not just by Billy Corgan, but also by Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine as well as some more obscure 90s alt-rock bands like Hum, but Silversun Pickups use it so skilfully you would swear that they are veterans of that music scene if you didn't know any better.

The album does get a little bogged down in the middle though, not helped by the middling, quiet track 'Draining' destroying all of their momentum right in the middle of the album. It's also around this point that Aubert's voice starts to get seriously annoying at times, while his extremely distinctive vocal style does make the band stand out, when the loud noise around it is stripped away it begins to sound very flat and depthless.

You shouldn't let this put you off though, and the superb brooding shoegaze of album finisher 'Surrounded' pretty much makes up for any moments of boredom that you might encounter in the middle reaches of this album. If you can stomach a fair bit of melodrama in your music, and if you're like me and nostalgic for the way that alternative rock used to sound, "Swoon" should meet all of your musical requirements.