‘Floods’ is the third single taken from Fightstar’s highly acclaimed second album ‘One Day Son This Will All Be Yours’, with a whole host of extras it’s something that fans of Fightstar will surely be excited about. The song ‘Floods’ is an excellent showcase for what Fightstar are all about nowadays, long gone are the days of them being “that guy from Busted’s band”, they are now standing on their own merit and doing a fine job of it.

‘Floods’ is a result of seeing Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, which had a big bearing on the overall theme of the album. Fightstar have become very good at writing amazing songs and using great audio dynamics extremely well, this song is a prime example; starting off with the piano, then we get a heavy barrage of guitars, drums & bass before the verse, then that lovely piano creeps back into the forefront before storming through one of their most uplifting and melodic choruses to date. The song comes down to a lovely piano section before roaring back into the chorus for a last time, it’s pretty standard stuff but it’s done really well. The contrast between quiet and loud, and the overall dynamic of the song really does wonders and completely hooks you in. Just to finish off there’s a bit more piano for good measure. As far as singles go it’s hard to fault.

Across the various formats of release this single has a number of B sides and additional material. There is an acoustic version of the single floods; which uses the exact same piano parts, but replaces the electric with acoustic (obviously) and sees the addition of a lovely string section, with the cello before the chorus standing out especially. This version highlights how much the song is driven by the piano part, which stands above everything else a little too much in honesty and detracts from how nice the song sounds with the acoustic and string sections.

There are three other songs on offer, firstly ‘Zihuatanejo’ (suggestions of pronunciation are welcome...) is epic and builds up from a really dark sounding guitar part mixed with more strings. At first Charlie Simpson’s voice sounds like something from a Keane song, though that comparison quickly dies. The song really builds into something epic though still keeping the feel of orchestral elements, which adds a real charm. ‘Flotation Therapy’ is an offering from the CD version of the single, starting off with a piano and programmed drums with a haunting vocal part, it quickly evolves into much more familiar Fightstar territory, and more along the lines of Deftones, a really weird combination for one song but they pull it off as ever.

The final new offering is the song ‘Dark Star’, where Alex Westaway offers lead vocals which is something that seems to have rescinded a lot as Fightstar have developed. This song once again displays a brilliant dynamic maturity, through lots of ambience it gradually builds into something huge and irresistible. The only criticism is that to get all 5 of these tracks you’ll have to buy a CD, 7” vinyl, and downloads from Gut Store and iTunes. But if you’re willing to do all that then this is a superb collection of songs and really showcases what Fightstar have evolved into, a massive, beautiful, dynamic beast, get ready to drop all preconceptions of Charlie Simpson’s band, you won’t need them when you listen to this.