Mermaidens - 'Look Me In The Eye' Album Review

Tracklist:

1. Crying In The Office

2. Sleeptalker

3. Millennia

4. I Might Disappear

5. The Cut

6. She's Running

7. Bastards

8. Best To Hate The Man

9. Priorities

This is clearly a band with a lot of ideas, unfortunately, in the first song of this album, 'Crying In The Office', it feels like they've tried to throw too many into the one song. It’s like they couldn’t decide what they wanted the song to be so kept messing about with it, which is disappointing as what follows is much better and I’d hate to think this song would put anyone off listening further.

The second song, 'Sleeptalker' is the exact opposite, it’s brooding, focussed, ethereal and excellent, it does have some changes of pace but in this case they work in a way that made me want to keep listening.

The third song, 'Millennia', keeps up the quality of the second song, it’s like the band realised they needed to write songs that would drag people in and keep them listening, if that was their intention then mission achieved.

From this point on the quality of the album is not in doubt, I started playing guess the influences, I think I can detect some Throwing Muses, some Cocteau Twins, a bit of PJ Harvey, Warpaint and, possibly, and this one I’m not sure about, a little bit of Dinosaur JR.

Apart from the first song, which just didn’t do it for me, this is an excellent album.

My own favourites are 'She’s Running' and 'Bastards' but I think you could pick nearly any song on this album as your first listen and enjoy it.