Allo Darlin’ - Allo Darlin’

There's a fine line between homage and piggybacking, and Allo Darlin' shuffle along it quite precariously, through the course of this debut lifting choruses in their entirety from Weezer, John Cale and The Sound of Music. Borrowing Que Sera Sera for finale What Will Be Will Be seemingly sums up their rather fatalistic approach to music: all the best songs have been written, so why bother trying to write anything different?

This could be overlooked if they combined their fragments with any degree of inventiveness, but the glue holding this found sound together smells all too familiar, namely like Camera Obscura's Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi, barring Kiss Your Lips which is really rather shamelessly just Five Years Time mark two. To a kinder ear, songs like Heartbeat Chilli and Polaroid Song do have a gentle charm to them, just one as resolutely unprogressive as their parent genre of twee. I suppose it’s unfair to expect much more than this. [Oisin Kealy]