The Little Ones - The Dawn Sang Along

No matter what era you live in, there will always be someone ineptly ripping off 60s pop. The 60s itself set a bad example, with its cannibalistic obsession with pointless cover versions, but those were different times - pop was less an artform, more a system for rinsing teenagers' pockets in (what the nascent industry deemed) the most efficient way. Today, The X-Factor et al have that market sewn-up, and 'legitimate' groups like The Little Ones are expected to put in a bit of effort if they want people to listen to the first 20 seconds of their songs on Spotify.

The Little Ones, right down to the

' with a load of vacant hippy bullshit.

The album starts off with '

', which, while not terrible, is too inarticulately peppy for a recession, and I'm not sure people have been waiting for a tween-friendly version of Yeasayer in 2013. It's mediocre-going-on-okay, but that said, it sounds fucking great when you loop back to it having choked down the flabby mid-section and gristly rump of this most nutritionally bereft of albums. 'Forro' and 'Catch the Movement' are hooky enough to soundtrack a bad indie film and a T-Moblie advert respectively, but I find my mind wandering to what kind of person would write such unambiguous, unambitious bollocks.

'Art in the Streets' sounds like a crap Zombies song, and the remainder are like a flavourless paste made from MGMT and Animal Collective offcuts. There's a track or two which skirt the edges of respectability: in 'AWOL', they use a lot of the same tricks Vampire Weekend were using five years ago, but do so with the modicum of craft and restraint missing elsewhere. But restraint, wit and intelligence are just some of the adjectives you could not truthfully apply to the album as a whole. If you like your music raw and unreconstituted, with a little texture and taste, then avoid.