Wyckham Porteous - sexanddrinking (Cordova Bay)

If you want to make a good impression with your album you put your best track as the opener and maybe you title the album after the track that you think sums up the entire thing. On listening to the opening track of this album, which also happens to be the title track, I prayed that the rest of the album would not be the same. 'sexanddrinking', the song, is a piss poor, camp effort that would look out of place on the soundtrack to "The Rocky Horror Picture Show". Everything about it reeks of shit and fakeness, the vocals, the guitars, the spoken word section in the middle. A song that should never have been written let alone recorded and put out on an album.

Then, on the other hand, we get the rest of "sexanddrinking", the album, which is a strange mix of modern American rock, country and fuck lot else besides. If it were a book, each song would be a different chapter, told by a different person each time, about different events and spoken in different voices. Impossible to pin down and so constantly changing after a few songs you'd even forget how bad that title track was.

Basically, though, the album goes rocking song, relaxed song, rocking song etc, the whole way through. A bit predictable, a little uninspiring and a lot of it sounds like Vertical Horizon. It's not that it's full of bad songs or anything, it's just that it's got a very poor standard that stays pretty stable the whole way through. The only song that really caught me was the heartbreaking 'Ophelia'. A gentle, soothing song of love and heartache set adrift in a sea of mediocrity.

Ken McGrath