The Beauty Shop’s John Hoeffleur describes A Desperate Cry For Help as a song for "anybody spending their second day in the same pair of socks; nobody wants to be there but sometimes – hey – that’s where you’re at".

And if you laughed at that while at the same time knowing exactly what he meant, then you might just dig this band.

The Beauty Shop trade in acoustic country rock of the kind which calls the Nevada Desert to mind; as opposed to hillbillies round a tin-can campfire. The music is rhythmically chipper with a kind of deliberate delicacy, and is performed in a deadpan manner which doesn’t let much slip and which deftly offsets the bleakness of the words. It’s serious music for people who don’t take themselves seriously, and is by way of being a bucket of cold water poured over the trivial histrionics of emo. Good work, that band.