City Reverb - Lost City Folk

City Reverb claim they are trying to soundtrack the modern city and provide us with a sonic guide to make sense of the confusion inherent in urban living. Useful, you might think, until you listen to it and realise it resembles a flavourless 90s chillout compilation which passed its sell-by date at the end of the last decade. Opener Everything Will Be Alright is not only weak but grossly inaccurate: things go downhill rapidly from there. The song When contains the line “stop making war, start making love” without a trace of irony and most others consist of similarly clichéd lyrics sung by bored-sounding people. The lowpoint is perhaps Hedonist, with its whispered refrain of “East End hedonist, West End hedonist, London hedonist”, coming across like a constipated Pet Shop Boys. As a work inspired by London, it’s not in the same borough as something like the evocatively eloquent Untrue. You’re better off with an A-Z. [Euan Ferguson]