The Urgency - The Urgency [Album]

Mercury

Poster boy emo. Don't Bother.

There's a debate ongoing at Altsounds about where the zeitgeist of modern rock is located - here in Britain, or across the Atlantic. It's a vexed discussion for certain, as Joy Division take on The Stooges, The Smiths do battle with Pavement and the Arctic Monkeys take on MGMT AND Vampire Weekend simultaneously. Up against the wall though, you've got to admit that over here in Blighty we've been responsible for producing some real dross. Goth. New Romantics. And Brit Pop. I acknowledge that many of our readers will probably have been deciding about whether to be a train driver or a policeman in the oily heyday of Blur Vs. Oasis, but aside from a handful - and I mean a handful - of acts like Pulp who managed to come through the era with some credibility, let me assure you it was uncontestably an artistic clusterfuck of thermo-bad taste proportions.

It'll never be as cringeworthy as emo though. A movement brain dead arguably at conception, the kohl-eyed hybrid of teen self deprecation, whining Billie-Joe on helium vocals and limp-dicked guitar chops somehow became the defining sound of mallrats everywhere. Some - not poor old Mr. Wentz though - saw what was coming and jumped ship unceremoniously. Panic! At ! The Disco! fucked ! off ! their ! fans ! with a prosaic single digit salute to all two million of them on Pretty Odd. Gerard Way even had the idea of turning his band into Queen, which you assume started out as a joke when everyone was real fuckin high on the tour bus, until hey presto, he discovered some people would seemingly pay for the sweat on his balls. And so it goes on, right up to right now, where freshly scrubbed Nashville quartet Paramore are wait for it - christian emo. "Like, god loves my prozac, dude." Gushing to the NME a couple of weeks back, singing munchkin Hayley Williams happily revealed that she and all the rest of her cohorts frequently took time out from getting really cross when they were grounded to genuflect:

"I pray randomly throughout the day..if I am in really high spirits, or I want to show gratitude." Gratitude? May I suggest you try pulling your fucking jeans up over your pants for starters? You may have gathered by now that I'm what you might call a "Hater" and well over 25.

Inconveniently, The Urgency aren't from somewhere in the suburbs of Chicago, ruining my nasty line about their conveyor belt ilk, but thankfully they tick every other one of the A&R boxes for acts who [as they would say in the vernacular], are "in this space." Happily then for me the five piece are from Brooklyn, another location suitably up it's own cool, and musically I'm glad to inform you that they make a noise so stuffed with derivation it's hard not to imagine them having to gain sample clearances on every song. They're also nauseatingly horny, as lantern jawed singer Tyler Gurwicz shows us during opener 'Fingertips' by stating dry humpingly "Baby, won't you spread your pretty little lips, and make room for my fingertips, so I could get caught between your legs tonight." There are plenty of other instances of this toilet wall lyricism too, but they're all equally as sexually alluring as a bucket of fish eyes.

As we were talking about religion though it's always good to confess your sins, and being honest I did like 'Dance, Dance.' And as we're talking too about sex, there are three songs which are good enough here to give you a feeling of dirty guilt in the same league as making love to your girlfriend whilst thinking about fucking her mom. I give you then 'Crimes' - a straight up Fall Out Boy rip off, but well executed - 'Rooftops,' on which Gurwicz reprises Sting doing 'Synchronicity II,' and 'Move You,' a funkier slope adjacent to The Rapture with the plug removed from their ass. The rest is only of interest if you have a teenage relative that's recently painted their room black and you're stuck for a Christmas present for them.

Oh, the Brits versus the Yoo-Ess-Ayy? We're both guilty as charged I'm afraid.