Anonymous.  Empty?  Tortured.  Miserable?  Pleasing.  Boring.

There's some bands - you see them live, you're not quite sure if the singer is a boy or a girl, the guitarist looks like he's been licking the backs of hallucinogenic toads for the past week and the drummer is that mad mass of hair, sweat and blood at the back.  They're superb, you stand there with your tongue lapping at the floor like a deranged vampire smelling the blood of virgins, and you rave about them to all your friends until either your head falls off or they shove it up your arse.

And then you see some other bands.  The most flaccid, turgid pieces of rotting flesh to get up on a stage since the last Bizkit tour, they make you want to strangle their skinny necks with their own intestines, stopping only to bludgeon their empty heads with the shards of broken instruments.

And Halo?  Halo are neither.  They are non-descript.  They are a non-event. Every song is a directionless journey of meandering falsetto over punchy chorus guitars.  Clutching at the coat-tails of Vex Red and any other passing British one-album rock wonder, there is a chasm of difference between Halo and the bands they secretly want to emulate.  They cannot do histrionics (like Muse can) they cannot do falsetto (like Radiohead can) they cannot do melody (like My Vitriol can) and they can't even do good-looking (like, er, Shed Seven can....I think I've lost my own point...).

And so, as every song built up to the chorus, you realize what a one trick sonic pony Halo actually are.  If they actually have but one song without a falsetto note in the chorus providing the hook for the whole song, will someone please tell them to play it more often, because I must have missed it when I was inspecting my fingernails for dirt.  It got THAT interesting.

Collen Chandler