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 Usually, when people suffer a setback, they
deal with it in one or two ways.
Either they revel in their own self-pity, decide that it’s all over and
give up…or, they re-group, treat the set-back as a welcomed kick up the
jacksie and use it to spur them on in the quest for success.
‘Make This Your Own’, the third album from The Cooper Temple Clause, is
the sound of a band taking the latter option.
After being dropped by their label and loosing their bassist to Carl
Barat’s Dirty Pretty Things, TCTC have clearly decided that the best
thing to do is not sit around moping, but rather get their act together
and try once again to conquer the masses with a new album on a new
label.
The result is this, a motley mix of songs that look for a middle ground
between the booming burst of sound that was their debut album, and the
electronic eclecticism of 2003’s ‘Kick Up The Fire, And Let The Flames
Break Loose’, in search of commercial appeal.
To that extent, ‘Make This Your Own’ is a good effort, with songs such
as ‘Waiting Game’ doing as much as possible to appease the mainstream.
Yet on the whole, there’s a sense of awkwardness lingering over this
album that makes it sound slightly clumsy.
As the band wrestle with eleven divergent tracks that range from heavy
thrashers such as ‘Homo Sapien’ and ‘Damage’ to the country-styled
soother that is ‘Take Comfort’, they spend much of their time swapping
instruments and trading lead vocal duties, which ultimately makes for an
incoherent album.
There’s a lot of good to be said about ‘Make This Your Own’, though.
Each individual segment of sound does come across as being a pretty
decent affair, yet bound together as they are here, this album comes
across as a band struggling to affirm their own identity in the quest
for mainstream acceptance.
Recommended Links:
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www.thecoopertempleclause.co.uk
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www.myspace.com/thecoopertempleclause
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