Blood Red Shoes - Box Of Secrets

These days we rarely expect bands to reinvent the wheel, just to make it perform some exciting spins, giving giddy thrills on a journey towards some momentary enlightenment. Accordingly, Brighton duo Blood Red Shoes fly their influences high on their album Box Of Secrets, so within two seconds of opening track Doesn't Matter Much we can already tick the 'sounds like Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song' box. However, BRS are able to muster an idiosyncratic, spiked guitar hook or unexpected middle-eight when it counts, best exemplified by the single It's Getting Boring By The Sea, which swoops in on a pulsing bassline that could double as the distress signal of a Klingon warship. Elsewhere there's perhaps too much reliance on a rather perfunctory verse-chorus-verse template, and a bit of pruning on the occasional song length wouldn't go amiss, but overall a fine if rather derivative debut. [Darren Carle]