White Belt Yellow Tag – Methods

 

White Belt Yellow Tag’s martial art-themed name connotes an experience level one step above novice, and as such the three-piece fit the billing perfectly. Their debut is uninspired, but played and produced with enough polish to disguise some of its shortfalls. Methods comes stuffed to the gills with melodies that beg for adjectives like ‘soaring’ and ‘epic’ but land on ‘leaden’. Doves are the influence they’d admit, Coldplay the influence they’d (probably) deny, and unfortunately it’s the latter’s worst tendencies that are most frequently apparent. It’s A long Way, Don’t You Fall Behind in particular would have fit nicely onto X&Y, with singer Justin Lockey metastasising into a Chris Martin clone – fine if you’re Chris Martin, but in this context it reeks of piggybacking. Before you give up, the more progressive likes of News suggest they could progress to full yellow-belt status yet. Who said acquiring ninja abilities was easy? [Chris Buckle]