Palm Springs – The Hope That Kills You

Apologies in advance - some of the normal tropes of album criticism must neccesarily fall by the wayside for the purposes of reviewing this particular record. You see, those tropes often hinge on an album's tracks posessing a certain minimum level of interest and distinctiveness, a level which depressingly-titled The Hope That Kills You lacks.This second album by Palm Springs, put out on their own Random Acts of Vinyl label, is not bad. It's just almost completely devoid of interest. The band don't even sound enthusiastic themselves, especially in the case of DC Cane, whose lead vocals are incredibly flat, seemingly aimed specifically at an audience that just doesn't listen to singing at all. He's there, and yet not there - a frustratingly hollow presence who sucks out much of the album's life. Unfortunately, this problem plagues most of the instrumental work, too. The arrangements here are lush, touched by strings, glocks and fashionable occasional washes of electronics, but they are uniformly uninspiring.It is the sound of a band who appear pathologically desperate not to offend. It is this pale inoffensiveness which whitewashes every song, forever refusing to expose any kind of emotional core and instead focusing on bland outer appearances. There's a chronic lack of unpredictability - these songs just breeze by lethargically and lazily, any attempts at being moving (which, I suspect, is the album's main aim) frustrated by the absence of any passages which stand out from the others. How can a song move you if it is barely capable of moving itself?Whilst trying to get to grips with what went wrong here is perplexing, deciding whether it is worth recommending certainly is not. The Hope That Kills You is, crucially, not bad. It is though, the most boring album I've heard in some time. This is a far cry from the best that the British independent music scene can offer.