Acres of Lions – Collections

Over a year since its Canadian release, the second album from British Columbia’s Acres of Lions arrives in the UK tripping over its own peppiness and oozing calculated heartache from every gloss-clogged pore. Though smartly presented, with buffed-up choruses and radio-friendly polish, Collections is a limp, generic and bland set that solves an equation no one ever posed: what might Jimmy Eat World sound like if they took inspiration from Scouting for Girls?

Lead single Reaction carries a particularly strong flavour of the latter thanks to finger clicks and bouncy piano lines, while everything about Kids, from lyrics (“we were young and we were bright / with diamonds in our eyes / you kissed me on the summer’s edge”) to production (including mid-song crowd sing-along) strains unsuccessfully for the relative respectability of unit-shifting millennial-emo in the Saves the Day vein. The results sound cynical and watered down; undeniably proficient, but difficult to warm to.