Evermore - The Truth of the World

Rating:

* * *

It's not hard to see how the Hume brothers' career seemingly got fast-tracked to the other side of the Tasman.

Their 2004 debut album

Dreams

was underrated (here) but terrific, a record that managed to be both familiar and fresh - young guys intent on something bigger than modest indiedom with heavy echoes of Pink Floyd, U2, and Radiohead.

Album number two

Real Life

got them noticed all the more, though suffered from a production which polished their songs to the point the studio sheen got in the way of the tunes. Still the likes of

Running

and sometime TV One jingle

Light Surrounding You

showed they might have a big international breakthrough hit single in them - though their post-

Dreams

signing to prestigious American label Sire seems to have gone by the wayside.

But on their third album Evermore seem to have let their grand ambitions get away on them - and it is just them, this one's produced by frontman Jon Hume - with what's been talked up as their take on a old-fashioned concept album.

Only despite its fleeting resemblances to Floyd, it feels more like something more recent, the sound of a band all too keen after a spot of pop success to prove their vast hidden depths, something which has recently afflicted the likes of My Chemical Romance and Panic at the Disco.

As the name, and song titles like

Infotainmentology

and

Front Page Story

suggest, it's all about living in a media-saturated world of the near-future. But Evermore's discourse - complete with a three-part title track offering the reports of one Fox News-ish host "Donovan Earl" - builds itself a soapbox only to have nothing particularly interesting or memorable to say. Yeah there's too much media cluttering up the place these days. The war on terror, global warming, blah blah ... and?

Often though the music escapes from all that conceptual over-reaching. Like when the early Enz-ish

Front Page Story

segues into

Diamonds in the River's

Indo-rhythms; when single

Hey Boys and Girls

throbs forth, all rumblings synths, handclaps and a chorus of what sounds like Prince and Nine Inch Nails playing the High School Musical prom; or

Girl With the World on Her Shoulders

is doing the big-reverb anthemics of old.

But too much of this sounds self-conscious and over-reaching. The portentous likes of Tonight on the Show and

Infotainmentology

sound like Floyd/Roger Waters sung by Billy Corgan while

Max is Stable

attempts to be the portrait of some poor school kid but really sounds like it belongs on

Summer Heights High's

next stage production. Fairly likeable despite itself, but a change of channel might be required before the next one.

Russell Baillie