The Noisettes - Scratch Your Name

The Noisettes come awfully close to being brilliant on this single, but never quite manage to make the artistic leap from sounding competent to actually delivering something you could fall in love with. The riff has bite and sleaze but is nevertheless second hand goods; Shingai's fantastic voice sparkles but never ignites in the way we know it can; and the chorus is too mired in cliché to be exciting ("scratch your name into the fabric of this world before you go." Yawn…). It has bags of promise though; these cats just need to cut loose and take some chances and they could deliver something spectacular. [Jay Shukla]