audience even further by stopping people from even listening to albums on anything other than the most archaic of CD players. It isn’t unexpected that ‘Casually Dressed’ features the same sort of irritation – they’re another member of the ‘rock band signed to a major, major label’ group (Time Warner); but as part of a trend that simply rejects many of the new ways of listening to your music, it doesn’t bode too well as a viable option for the industry. However, if you do manage to get it playing, you’ll find that the album that lies within the tightly protected packaging is a well crafted, inventive and polished album that may well live up to the usual hype that that is constantly being spun by the major labels’ PR guys ‘n gals. It isn’t anything particularly new to us here in the U.K. (sounding a lot like Hundred Reasons or Lost Prophets), but as melodic rock goes it is definitely something to try out, seeing as it simply wipes the floor with other evanescent efforts, and contains a hell of a lot more soul than many of the other Linkin Park wannabes. The album tends to sprawl around on a fairly similar sounding theme, and a lack of variation in tempo occasionally makes the album seem similar throughout (excepting the one acoustic track, ‘Your Revolution is a Joke’) - but with deeper inspection, if you can wade through the moat of Mr. Sheen, the songs are varied enough to keep you stuck to it, especially when they’re setting good examples to others with songs like ‘Escape Artists Never Die’. However, it’s still unlikely to make any converts of simple rock-heads however: pseudo-rock Darkness fans that spend most of their time listening to the Sugababes definitely need not apply. 3.5/5
Mark Danson
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