Vex Red

Halo are this year's King Adora. Suitable haircuts, well-honed technique in wrapping themselves around their mic stands, a couple of cute pop tunes and no substance whatsoever. They pilfer the melodies that Muse stole from Radiohead before they got their own identity - shamelessly presenting for our delight virtually half of Muscle Museum under another name. Certainly they pose and flounce with all the melodrama of Muse, but like every other aspect of them, any sense of emotion that should accompany it dies under the withering gaze of the calculated accountancy they employ. With a little more feeling Halo could be a truly satisfying band - they have more than a few hooks and every song sounds like it could really be something...almost. But frustratingly Halo are all surface. There is nothing biting, driven, passionate or real about them. One could call them lightweight guitar pop but they lack the charm of our best pop bands. They will sell records and win a few venues' worth of fans, but how long will it last? Nothing about them suggests any longevity.

Onto, then, Vex Red. Their metoric rise has been well charted; who doesn't know about Ross Robinson, the sold out shows and the army of fans they've already acquired, their debut album having been released barely a few weeks ago? Ah. Yes. The album. The point where the praise stopped being so glowing, and people began to realise that the electrifying live performances disguised VR's underlying problem - not very many songs. Their dilemma is the opposite to Halo's - they have buckets of sweaty emotion, grinding, yearning passion seething through every song, but once you've heard the album there's no going back; VR's live performance loses some of its sheen once the emptiness beneath it is revealed. 'Sleep Does Nothing for You' is of course magnificent, an anguished slash through that elusive organ we call the soul, while 'Can't Smile' makes you twitch, groove and ache simultaneously. But in between the standout tracks come the fillers. Every band has fillers - an inevitable fact. But Vex Red's fillers are less...er... filling than most. Their songs are somewhat polar; they either make you bleed empathy through your pores or bore you rigid with their turgid Silverchair-lite tedium. Of course they do sound far better live than on record, drenched in blood, sweat, tears and feedback, and their stage presence is undeniable; but post-album, the Wizards of Aldershot seem less like burgeoning rock stars, threatening to save our souls and corrupt our minds, and more like creatively-coiffed blokes with effect pedals.