The debut album by
the Pigeon Detectives, 2007's
Wait for Me, was a fairly scrappy, almost punky take on the great Brit-pop revival of the late 2000s, full of refreshingly concise two-minute rockers owing much to the
Buzzcocks/
Undertones tradition. The follow-up, released barely a year later, was produced by Stephen Street, whose work for
the Smiths,
Blur, and more recently
the Kaiser Chiefs has made him a major figure in the style. The handful of manic sub-180-second rockers here -- "Say It Like You Mean It," "You Don't Need It," "I'm Not Gonna Take This," etc. -- sound more or less like retreads of the band's earlier singles. ~ Stewart Mason