Losers – Beautiful Losers

This side project by radio DJ Eddy Temple-Morris along with Tom Bellamy from the Cooper Temple Clause attempts to follow the manifesto of Temple-Morris’s Xfm show, “where dance rocks,” to strike that note between the garage and the club, where indie rock forgets about its perfectly styled fringe for 2 hours and dances itself into a sweaty frenzy.

Opener, No Man Is An Island (Losers Theme) is a promising start, namechecking Van the man, Captain Beefheart and Robert Fripp in the same breath as French electro, and the sentiment attacking segregation along the lines of genre is admirable. But as the album continues it fails to prove all these elements combine as convincingly as they seem to attest. What most of this amounts to is, like second track Nothing Will Die, radio-fodder of the Bodyrockers variety, while a guest spot from Placebo’s Brian Molko on Summertime Rolls is a turgid, wasted opportunity. [Oisín Kealy]