On their third full-length, Australian quartet
Gyroscope finally shake off their always tenuous connection to punk and reveal themselves to be a mainstream pop/rock band with few musical aspirations further than a handful of FM radio hits.
Breed Obsession gets them that far -- opening track "Snakeskin" was their biggest single yet in their native land -- but at strong risk of permanently disillusioning a fairly large subset of their original fan base. The nonsensical lyrics of "Polyphons and Multidors" ("Now that I've cut you, you will never bleed again"...pardon?) and the remarkably naff tribute to their homeland, imaginatively named "Australia," are the only ones that stand out, with the rest of the album's songs being too full of shopworn clichés and unimaginative rhymes to stick in the listener's mind. Similarly, the tunes themselves are inoffensively catchy -- the jaunty "Her Design" and the arena anthem wannabe "1981" being the most immediately melodic -- but there's so little personality evident in the scrubbed-clean production and by the numbers arrangements that there's little to grab onto after the record is over.
Breed Obsession is generically tasty, but full of meaningless empty calories. ~ Stewart Mason