Haunts - Haunts

London’s Burning, the track which opens Haunts’ self-titled debut album, begins dreadfully with a rotten mix of faux-goth posturing and Rocky Horror theatricality. Less than a minute later and it’s a bouncy slice of irrepressibly catchy indie in the vein of Boy Kill Boy’s early singles. Unfortunately, the rest of the album foregoes such jolting highs and lows to settle on middle-of-the-road blandness. There’s nothing particularly wrong with songs like Live Fast Die Young’s Cure-meets-Rapture plod or the generic platitudes of Love Is Blind, other than the fact that - from the song titles to the execution - everything is tinged with cliché and sounds at least three years out of fashion. The knockout round of Mobile Act Unsigned is littered with the ghosts of such derivative indie-rock bands, and while Topshop will always need new bands to soundtrack its aisles, anyone looking for a bit of heart, soul, or indeed spirit is best looking elsewhere.