I Love UFO – Dirty Animals

It's said that the French can't do rock, which sounds pretty unfair, until you start digging around and find a dearth of notable guitar-slinging groups hailing from across the English Channel. Perhaps, since they excel at everything from food and language to high culture, rock music isn't foremost on their list of preoccupations.

I Love UFO are a Parisian four-piece who're challenging the status quo, although there's little in the way of haute couture about their grizzly second album, Dirty Animals. Having bolstered the already dirt-thick sound of their 2006 debut Wish with a second guitarist, ...Animals treads familiar ground; grinding out tunes somewhere between the dirgeful riffage of Catherine Wheel and vocal outpourings of The Cure.

Clear Darkness finds them at their best, with frontman Butch McKoy's howling vocals buried in a wall of pummelling guitars; but overall Dirty Animals fails to captivate or inspire for any length of time. [Martin Skivington]