Super Natural

Review by Darren Gawle

Let's see, there are British bands who try to sound American (e.g. Bush), and there are Canadian bands who try to sound British (e.g. Sloan), but I daresay that this is the first case I've ever seen of a British band trying to sound like an American band who's trying to sound like a British band. Confused? Don't worry -- let's just say that the four best words to describe Super Natural are "shit on a stick."

I had to consult the band bio to find out if these shysters really are from the U.K., so phony are their cockney accents, and, lo and behold, they are from the Reading area. Perhaps they're just a bunch of upper-class home counties twats injecting lower-class speech patterns into their songs to sound authentic, then. Bennet play a particularly annoying brand of Britpop/grunge fusion; occasionally you can tell they'd like (or "loike," as they'd say) to sound like Blur and/or Supergrass, but Mungo Jerry would be closer to the mark.

Tunes? "Curly Shirly" features a good syncopated riff which pulls against the beat, but with a weedy cockney accent singing lines like "I hope she knows what I mean when I say that I want to lick her clean," you're bound to renew your acquaintance with your 'skip' button. "Cha Cha Charlie" and "Mum's Gone to Iceland" ("Iceland" is the name of a supermarket chain in Britain, so mum hasn't literally gone to an island in the North Atlantic) demonstrate Bennet's general inability to come up with anything engaging, and "Norway Wife" is positively excruciating in a squeaky vocals kind of way. There's a message at the end of the surprisingly pretty "Never Ending Blue" to stay tuned for "the obligatory secret track" -- if you can get that far.

One question, though: why, if this is a CD, is "33 rpm" printed on the disc? I hate it when people think they're clever...