Asaf Avidan & The Mojos - The Reckoning

Those of us who were young and carefree in the early 00s will probably remember an Irish singer-songwriter called Damien Rice. More specifically, you'll remember being at open mic nights, listening to awful young men cover his banal songs in an attempt to pick up chicks. The first song on this album is just like that: full of clunking metaphors ("She was made of mercury/ She'd come together later piece by piece") along with faux-anguished whinnies and wails giving the illusion of emotional depth. Occasionally he even does that croaky thing Paolo Nutini does to make himself sound soulful which is just horrible.

The next two songs are retrograde nonsense: clichéd bar-room blues that, since 1977, condemns bands to playing pubs with England flags outside and toothless 50-year old groupies. How this lot escaped that deserved rock-purgatory I don't know, maybe they don't have toothless 50-year old groupies in Israel. 'Weak' is a drowsy moan-along about being weak; it sounds like Turin Brakes, but at half speed with worse lyrics.

Lyrics really aren't a strong point for Avidan. 'Reckoning Song's chorus observes "One day baby we'll be old/ And think of all the stories that we could have told." Likewise "cry" is rhymed with "dry", "door" with "before", then you start playing the game where you have to guess what the next rhyme will be, and you get about 90 per cent of them, and you stop playing but you realise that the game was the only time you were getting any kind of satisfaction from the record, so you keep playing.

Things do improve a bit: 'Sweat and Tears' and 'Rubberband Girl' are the kind of anthemic MOR numbers that Dave Grohl probably wouldn't be too ashamed of shitting out right now (and if that sounds like faint praise, well spotted). 'A Phoenix is Born' is everything wrong with Led Zeppelin - white 'blues', neutered wailing, general testosterone toss - within one minute, four seconds of music. 'Over You Blues' contains the line "My baby she just a little puppy/ But she's acting like a full-grown bitch" which is probably all you need to know.

The last two songs are fairly pleasant, which is a nice contrast to some of the obnoxious stuff early on. They are slower with strings, twinkling pianos and none of the tiresome vocal acrobatics that blight the bluesy songs. There's a hidden track too which also fits into the "nice but uninteresting" category. That's the best I can say about them: when they're not being the most gauche, unoriginal band on the planet they are inoffensive.