Vex Red: Start With a Strong and Persistent Desire

Well, thankfully the band don't feel the need to interrupt their songs with a bit of rapping, sampling or incessant swearing.

Vex Red is a band from Aldershot who were flown to America after Slipknot's producer asked for demo tapes to be sent to him via Kerrang.

So the album Start With a Strong and Persistent Desire has a big, clear production and lots of soaring tunes.

Big budget stuff indeed, and the whole package has the smell of a band going somewhere. For the full effect you need to play it loud and experience the guitars being let loose.

The songs betray no individual band's influence (a good thing) and don't merge into a tuneless, cacophonous dirge (another good thing).

If you want to mosh then I recommend Itch and Sleep Does Nothing For You.

If on the other hand you despair of the human condition, then it's Untitled with it's rust-stripping, coruscating guitars.

Very much devotees of the Pixies/Nirvana school of the quiet/loud school of songs, the band maintains your interest from start to finish.

Highly enjoyable listening for those of us still young enough to play it in our bedrooms, or old enough to play it in our cars.

ANTONY SILSON

Heron: The Brown Room

In the year 2002 it must be very difficult to bring out a totally original recording. To Heron's credit he's certainly achieved this with his album The Brown Room, but are the results any good?

Sadly, the answer is no. The recording's originality lies in the fact that it's so mind numbingly awful. At its best this album is incredibly dull and at its worst (Punk Mutha) totally awful.

Plink-plonk Casio keyboards and half-spoken vocals over a tinny drum beat make for something that sounds like a mutant cross-breed between Kraftwerk and The Beatles' Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.

The songs are all as unimaginative as the song titles, the previously mentioned Punk Mutha, J-Funk, I'll B Your Alibi.

Thankfully the total running time is barely seconds over 30 minutes. After a mere ten I'd heard enough but held out until the end in the hope things would get better. They didn't!

It's so infuriating that there is so much talent out there just waiting to be signed up and Hut Records release this sorry offering.

GRAHAM SCAIFE

Ashley Slater's Big Lounge

What to expect then from Ashley Slater? He's Norman Cook's sometime songwriting partner and ex lead vocalist of Cook's mid-90's band Freakpower -best known for their Levi's endorsed Turn On, Tune In, Cop Out - so are we in store for a wave-your-hands-in-the-air knees up?

What you hardly expect, and precisely what you get, is a blend of reflective old school balladry and jaunty jazz-inflected grooves.

It's becomes obvious then that Slater's lounge isn't the sort you'd expect. Far from Cook's big beat boutique days, this is a proper lounge with comfortable chairs, a smooth coffee table and a joss stick burning in the corner.

There's a real talent emerging from under the Fatboy's wing but for every winning track - the opener Private Sunshine is a warm, cosy paean to his loved one - there's a couple of all too similar fillers. Likewise, the wonderfully funky Strange Dreams breeds a few plodding inferior wannabes.

Elsewhere, disappointment lurks on Cook's only collaboration, Husband - a track which reeks of, yes, acid jazz - it's hardly Star 69 and best confined to the back of any Cook completist's record collections.

At the death, Slater impresses the most. Penultimate track Our Dream sounds like just that, an atmospheric, placid track that builds into a huge orchestrated crescendo.

But as the album should close on a high, Slater does something stupid with, well, Something Stupid. His take on the standard is pleasant enough but too namby-pamby compared to what's come before it.

Overall then, a mixed bag. If Slater stretches the potential here a little further, his second album could be breakthrough.

MANNY GRILLO