I’ve been a bit slow on picking up this band. Hearing of the dynamic quartet through Myspace, I added them to my friends list with the intention of following-up their music and making something of it if I could. Cue my return a few months later to their popular page and I find myself listening to the featured tracks and wondering why the hell I hadn’t contacted them sooner. Two days on and I’ve got their debut CD in one hand, press release in another and sparkling Kerrang! review between my teeth.

The first thing that has stricken pretty much every journalist that’s gotten their muddy paws on this record is the revelation that, despite instrumentally being a rather generic three guitarist and a drummer set up, it’s the drummer that also plays the part of lead vocalist. This immediately makes me want to see the band live just so I can note whether this fact helps or hinders their capabilities on stage. I remember being at a Sum 41 show not long ago and during one of the songs the band’s drummer was required to take on a duelling vocal lead with his guitarist counterpart. Disappointing as I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. Is this also the case for The Fallout Theory?

That’s for the live review to discover. Meanwhile, we still have the record to dissect. I had to listen to ‘So Happy You’re Not Here’ three times before realising where I’d heard this sound before. While singing of love lost, lovelorn and love unrequited tales of woe – the lyrical content disappointingly not providing a very radical perspective on any of these issues, Carl Haffield (drummer/singer extraordinaire) dredges up vocals that are all too reminiscent of that of Vinnie Caruana of The Movielife whilst suffering from the same disease as Ben Jorgensen of Armor For Sleep in his incapabilities when it comes to stretching his range. Coupled with the unoriginality of the lyrics, this all produces a sound that, when played, causes you to desperately search your mind to think of where you heard it last.

To be fair it’s not all a murky deja-vu-inducing compilation CD and even if it was, maybe that’s not such a bad thing? I don’t know about you but I kinda miss The Movielife’s non-commercial elegance gracing our airwaves and similarly there’s absolutely no justification in the argument that The Fallout Theory have tried to create a mainstream debut. The riffs and hooks are there, but in unusual places – evidently this band were unconcerned with the placement of choruses, verses and bridges when they wrote, the result being a collection of songs that keep you on the edge of your seat waiting to hear what comes next, rather than picking up the beat after the intro. Despite losing marks on unoriginality for vocals and lyrics, The Fallout Theory gain them back for ignoring the cut-out routine to success. And hopefully they’ll be one of the bands that later prove that breaking the mould can yield the fame they desire.