Album: The Cooper Temple Clause

Make This Your Own, SEQUEL

The glaring dichotomy at the heart of The Cooper Temple Clause's music is much more apparent on this third album. On the one hand, they have a nice line in synth-based electropop, best exemplified here by the chugging groove of "Head" and the Giorgio Moroder-esque cycling pulses carrying "Connect". On the other, tracks such as the opener "Damage" and "Homo Sapiens" sound cunningly designed to appeal more to a mainstream American audience: Ben Gautrey's vocal on the former has a slick, transatlantic polish, while the latter's swaggering panache and hubristic, breast-beating lyric ("I am a man, a superstar/ I shine so bright, a worldwide success") combine in a quintessentially American orgy of fame-lust. Both strains are less well handled elsewhere, but the disparity between styles is tempered somewhat by their tentative incursions into yet more new areas, particularly in "House of Cards", whose vocal mantra is warmly supported by burnished horns and cello.

DOWNLOAD THIS: "Damage", "Head", "House of Cards"