Album: Glasvegas, Glasvegas (Columbia)

Be honest: you'll scream if you read another agitated blog or hear another airhead broadcaster proclaim Glasvegas as the country's best new band?

Once again, internet froth and lather hasy over-inflated the value of what, on the strength of this debut, is a fairly average band. Accordingly, the album will chart high, but leave many feeling short-changed by its dreary blend of shoe-gazer guitar drones, cathedral-sized reverb and depressing lyrics about crime, prison, absentee fathers and street violence.

"Daddy's Gone" effectively evokes the pain of separation from the child's aspect, and "Geraldine" pays fitting tribute to a social worker; but elsewhere, the insistence on plastering everything in leaden walls of sound, in the overweening manner of Oasis or Embrace, sweeps away any differentiating detail, rendering all issues – from murder on down – equally blurred, bloated with bogus grandiosity. Worst of all is "Stabbed", a few mumbled anxieties about knife-crime spoken over the Moonlight Sonata.

Pick of the album:'Daddy's Gone', 'Geraldine'

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