EP review: Dissolved In – Proudly Dressed

Somewhere in Eastern Europe (maybe just on the borders of Russia) there is a huge factory churning out identikit punk-pop boy bands like Dissolved In. They dress like The Hives or the White Stripes, they look like an ugly McFly/Busted covers band and – on the basis of the Proudly Dressed EP – they sound like they’re twelve years old and have no idea what they’re doing.

Each of the vacuum-packed and unit-shifted plastic bands off the production line are given a slight quirk to allow for a tiny bit of differentiation: in this case it’s nursery song keyboards on the likes of “Mapped Roads” and “Avoiding Atrophy” and a predilection for shouted “ohs”, “oohs”, “aahs” and stretched “nos”, “wohs” and “sos”. The Proudly Dressed EP has the crass sound of people writing the lyrics to fit the music.

Dissolved In appear to have left the words until last, the banalities of the poor lyrics only barely passing muster. Could you be bothered with a band who sing “you want my attention, what is your intention” and pass it off as profound? I suspect Dissolved In need to buy a better rhyming dictionary – but with stiflingly clichéd choruses like “ohh woo oh oh oh it all ends tonight girl, tonight girl” there doesn’t seem any point in bothering.

“Egocentric” is plainly forgettable, but has the most bizarre twist: someone seems to have jammed a seventies prog rock keyboard solo over the top in an effort to give it a personality. It’s as if the Buzzcocks were covering Emerson, Lake & Palmer – and it sounds as stapled together as that implies. It sounds like a producer’s idea to me, because the band don’t even list a keys man in their line-up and it’s just too well-played to be one of the band moonlighting.

What’s peculiar about the Proudly Dressed EP is that the final bonus five second riff of “Peter Pan Syndrome” and the practically accapella ending to “Avoiding Atrophy” are actually vaguely interesting, but all the splattered vocal mannerisms and mind-crushingly tedious tunes sweep those brief moments away in a bland concoction of heard-it-all-before.

Forming a band is a huge laugh and – in the early days, at least – a great deal of fun, but you need songs and new ideas to back it up. Dissolved In melt away without any talent on show.