The Missing Season - Getting Back

Having been around a fair while, you might think The Missing Season are due a break. But this French band describe themselves as grunge-pop, when really, they owe more of their sound to the decade they came about in. Every album hence has been steeped in indie-rock, so what could make Getting On any different.

We’ll start with what they’re doing right. That’s finding a sound which pulls away from the white noise of the noughties indie scene, playing to what must be their perceived strengths on ‘Party Girl’. There is a laid-back Foo Fighters vibe to this track, detailing mixed feelings about that one girl at the party who everyone has come across.

‘Shake Shake’ contains the same fuzzed, lazy guitars, but throws in a woozy surf pop chorus and guitar line. This kind of reinvention and genre mashing might be an accident or conscious decision, either way, they ought to pursue it.

The reason they should pursue that avenue is because the rest of the album is barely worth listening to. Maybe it’s because English isn’t their mother tongue, but the lyrics often feel flat. It doesn’t help that the melody plays so safely to the guitars and bass, leaving you little to listen out for. ‘Fear’ is the main culprit of this, while ‘Power Hungry Man’ seems to pick on people who want to succeed in life without much justification as for why.

Their sound certainly has progressed to be more as they claim it to be, but if you chance your way across their back catalogue, you wouldn’t really discern much more from them than you do here.

You could say this is just a super laid back version of grunge pop, but the tiresome ‘Sunday Night’ and ‘Notorious Man’ will have you feeling generous at even granting them that.