Cheap thrills.  Cheap thrills and make-up.  You have to wonder if there is anything more to this band.  King Adora are right to say ‘Big Isn’t Beautiful’ – it seems that ugly is meant to be the new beautiful, along with pre-ironic stupidity being the New Manics and crap being the new good.  Well, I’ll tell you now, I don’t buy any of it, its not big and its not clever.

Which kind of sums up King Adora really doesn’t it – not big and not clever?  If they write one more song about sex they will officially become ‘badly dressed pop’ rather than ‘rock’s big saviours’ like they have always claimed to be.  Singer Matt Browne once said he wouldn’t let people down like the Manics did – er, you’ve already done it, big mouth.  Yeah, they have some genuinely good songs – ‘Smoulder’ is great, although the best part (the funny vocoder bit at the start of the chorus) is a sample.  How ironic.

And little apart from that gets above the mediocre pub band that they really are.  It wouldn’t surprise me if they were little more than a record company manufacture, told what to wear and how to sound, just like Hear’Say – in fact, if you listen to some reports, that might not be entirely removed from the truth.  There’s certainly a market for Placebo-lite make-up wearing boys, which hasn’t been tapped since Mansun grew up and dropped their eyeliner image.  Trying to emulate the Manics or the Clash (and any other of the intelligent punk bands they name drop) is all well and good – full credit to them – but you have to have some great lyrical reference points to be deemed intelligent and original music to be a punk.  They fail on both counts, quite disgracefully.

But maybe that’s what attracts people to King Adora – the dumbness, the total baseness, the (dare I say it) sexiness of looking and sounding so atrociously bad – maybe people are genuinely attracted to it.  In this day and age when Thom et al are trying to feed the five thousand billion (very admirably, of course) maybe we do need a bit of dumb sex and glamour.  I just wish they wouldn’t build themselves up to be more intelligent than this and...accept.  We really do need rock glamour and bombast in this day and age, and King Adora will be that dumb-ass band to provide it, whether I or anyone else like it or not.  I think they call it free trade capitalism.  Cheap thrills.  Well, what else should I expect from a band named after a vibrator?

Collen Chandler