Perhaps I should have had the sense to see it coming, but the rather pompously-titled Vice and Virtue by the daftly-named Keith is a bit of a duffer, to be honest. The title and closing track, with its nine-and-a-half-minute bulk, finishes things off in the same way that a big piece of ice finished off the Titanic - fairly slowly, but painfully. Containing such witticisms as "you think you are right / but you are probably wrong", it just goes on and on and on. In fact, it's baffling to think that the band actually kept on playing like this in the studio - did it not strike anyone how incredibly dull it was getting, how mind-numbing it was? It's hypnotic in the worst possible way, crushing any hope that Keith might be able to produce anything genuinely interesting on the record.In fact, despite only having ten songs, Vice and Virtue feels very flabby indeed, relying as heavily as it does on endless repititions of the same drab themes and riffs, opening with a huge and utterly pointless slab of "suspenseful" and "cinematic" noise, and insistently sprinkling proceedings with dose after dose of monotony and dullness. Barely-acceptable plodders like 'Up in the Clouds' and 'You Don't Know' are pretty much the best there is to offer here, on a set of songs which is, at its height, achingly average.Lead singer Oli Bayston's voice sounds whiny and adolescent to my ears, and will quite probably sound like a scolding nag to many, especially given the similarly unencouraging quality of the lyrics, which are, like the rest of the writing and musicianship, instantly forgettable. Despite ostensibly being a rock band, Keith crucially fail to rock, instead trundling along with a sound so sluggish and gloopy that you'd think they were sponsored by Lyle's. Whilst the year may be young and things may be a bit quiet, Vice and Virtue is still a long, long way from being an essential purchase. 32%Keith on MySpace