Maps - Turning The Mind

 For a genre that only really produced one cast-iron classic album first time around, shoegaze isn’t half everywhere these days. Deerhunter, The Big Pink, The Horrors, even the classic-pop loving Girls to name but a few – several of the best records of the last 18 months bear its unmistakeable hallmark of feedback-drenched guitars, deep-in-the-mix vocals and dreamy pop melodies.

Turning the Mind is the second album from Maps, the musical identity of James Champman. The first, We Can Create, was undeservedly Mercury nominated, the judges once again hearing something that these ears missed completely. The follow-up is a stodgy affair, aiming for the sort of electro-shoegaze dreaminess pioneered by Spiritualized and M83, but it falls way short, at its best getting somewhere close to Ian Brown’s clunky dance-rock. At its worst it’s a truly hideous beast – the self-conscious, awkward ‘Let Go of the Fear’ and lame trance beats of ‘Love Will Come’ come dangerously close to the sort of thing Peep Show’s Jez and Superhans might turn out while high as kites in the bathtub.

Things actually start well enough: the opening title track may be a shameless Ladies and Gentlemen retread but it’s an undeniably pretty one. Yet it’s followed up by ‘I Dream of Crystal’ which plunges the listener into Chapman’s turgid world of tedious, mopey drug references (the ghost of the last Interpol album looms large here) and sticky-sweet synth (non-) melodies.

The whole nu-gaze scene may be hipper-than-thou, and accusations of bandwagonism could be levelled at several of the bands involved. Indeed, you could probably accuse The Horrors of a lot of things, but you certainly couldn’t accuse them of a lack of personality – but Turning the Mind suffers from exactly that. Chapman’s breathy vocals are a real problem – they’re deathly dull and he has no range to speak of. Even worse, he occasionally veers into the sort of quasi-American accent that is to be avoided at all costs. With so many bands doing this sort of thing to a much higher standard, there’s precious little to recommend Turning The Mind – indeed, there’s a song called ‘Nothing’ on here, which says it all really.