Off The Radar are "a passion pop three piece", says the press release, and Seen From Space is their debut album. It has some good songs on it, but taken as a whole it doesn’t quite click. Vexing, really…

Much of why it doesn’t quite work is because Seen From Space is one of those albums which begs comparison to the sound of other bands: the sound doesn’t feel individual enough to merit a new description of its own. This state of affairs is compounded by the fact that there’s no one band who Off The Radar sound exactly like: they flit from Supergrass to The Beatles to *These Animal Men *circa Accident and Emergency, and in each case they never live the sound enough to sound better than a faded version of the original band. So, you end up with Supergrass without the lust for life or These Animal Men without the speed (imitating the Beatles never works – no band has sufficient FAB™), which simply doesn’t work, and the different styles never gel sufficiently. And so it doesn’t engage the listener, and it’s a hard album to view as a coherent whole.

However, there is much of the good on here. At odd moments there’ll be a breath-taking vocal harmony in the chorus or a drum part that demands that you dance or a massive guitar riff with a bit of bite to it. Admittedly those moments currently stick out from the noncommittal whole in a somewhat jarring way, but that doesn’t make them any less mighty – and they’re rather good grounds for hoping that OTR’s second album will consist entirely of those fully-realised moments, and that the next thing they release will live up to that promised "passion pop". Fingers crossed...