Album Review

Burn The Mona Lisa – Run Amok

• 31st Jan 2008

According to the press notes for their new single, Burn the Mona Lisa have kidnapped Pop! It’s tied up in a rehearsal room somewhere in Bolton. If you ever want to see Pop again, you must be willing to shred the Emperor’s New Clothes, overthrow the over-rated … and burn the Mona Lisa!

Yeah! They’re a dangerous band! They hate the mundane! They’re artists! YEAH!

Well, unfortunately, like the incompetent kidnappers from the film Ruthless People, they haven’t got a fucking clue. Burn the Mona Lisa’s new single, ‘Run Amok’, is a patchy and inconsistent production at best.

Run Amok, the title track, is a derivative rock-electronica song that’s so current it’s already gone mouldy. A low-fi salute to 80s art rock, it’s perfectly at home in the new ‘London sound’. (You know the one: arts and crafts, sixteen-year old girls wearing neon towelling socks, plastic heart-shaped sunglasses …)

As if to prove the point, the second track, Insatiable, opens with a vocal sample of Howard Moon from The Mighty Boosh. It then all too comfortably slips into a cocky, slurring pseudo-anthem – the kind of complete bollocks you’d expect to hear from Hard-Fi. (God, I hate Hard-Fi. I really do. I hate ’em!)

But, there’s hope: The final track, ‘Nursery Rhymes’, finds Burn the Mona Lisa at their most comfortable and honest. Tipping its hat to the kind of baggy, psychedelic rock that the North West does best, it’s also a catchy little ditty that reminds me of The Spinto Band. Judging it as a piece in its own right, I’d even go so far as to say that it was quite good.

What next, then? Visit MySpace, listen to the music, maybe even catch a gig … Just don’t burn the Mona Lisa.