The promo copy of 10:20 received for this review mixed up tracks on Windows Media Player, resulting in a frantic attempt to try and match songs to names from YouTube cuts and the like. The sheer struggle of drawing identifying tones from an abyss of ordinariness left a sense of foreboding that remained for the duration.

This is The Twang’s third album, and it appears that time has wasted ambition, effort and desire. Numerous British guitar bands are turning out interesting music with a nod to their background and a bit of a riff on the norm; Spector have a sense of the ironies of pop, Flashguns (despite having split) ally catchiness with sparks of inspiration and Life In Film evoke The Libertines and add in loaded lyrics with a great line in acoustics. The Twang fail on all counts, over-reliant on repetitious harmonisation, words drenched with superficial urban discontent and, above all, a lack of passion for their music. Not the sort-of-cool-detached-indie stylings of The Vaccines’ latest, but the air of a band who just wish they could stop making music.

‘Mainline’ bizarrely intertwines political commentary with piano reminiscent of a circus bounce, but any ironic sentiment is lost to images of dancing elephants superimposing themselves on the mind. With bad indie music in the background. Not a great start from this Brummie bunch, who are simultaneously painfully derivative and impossible to differentiate. ‘Paradise’ sounds like a vengeful tune written by McFly in their darkest hours, and ‘Guapa’s attempts at expansive vocal range leads to morose moans fading in to an all-too-brief raucous nod to Dirty Pretty Things which is really quite good. Unfortunately this lasts for about thirty seconds before disinterested guitar parts return; as if a metronome has been attached to the pick and the band have gone AWOL.

‘Whoa Man’ is similarly promising with its abandonment of verse-chorus-boring breakdown-thankful end for a more fluid structure, but these are lights peeking out of a regressive, crushing darkness. The remainder of the album is an amorphous ooze of guitar effects, rhyming gerunds and the eternal, anonymous ‘you’, dumped out of the speakers with all the punch and panache of a blindfolded Audley Harrison.

To summarise, when Phil Etheridge remarks that ‘somebody needs to get a backbone/Because somebody’s taking the piss’ on ‘Mainline’, the contention that this work is ‘their most reflective yet’ finally rings true.