Newport duo Feeder might forever be known for a song named after a man displaced in time: Buck Rogers (on their sci-fi tinted anthem Echo Park), which reached the UK Top 5 in 2001. Eighteen years after that commercial peak, as the band mark their 25th anniversary with 10th album Tallulah, Grant Nicholas and Taka Hirose sound a little displaced themselves.
Tallulah, described by the pair as a road trip through their pan-American influences, often feels like a tour of noughties guitar music that time, or at least the zeitgeist, forgot. Daily Habit harks back to Britpop with its Elastica-ish riffs and banal observations (“sipping coffee, drinking alone / this cafe culture is out of control” sings frontman Nicholas) while everything about Fear of Flying feels forged in early Foo Fighters: the phaser-slathered production, its giant guitar solo climax, even the track title.
Elsewhere, there’s grand, Muse-like arpeggiating synths to be found on the title track, and a moment of Smashing Pumpkins melancholy in Guillotine – a ballad of bells, strings and emotive acoustic strums that hints at social media witch hunts and climate crisis-era malaise. “Here we are again, thinking ’bout the world, what our children will be left,” Nicholas laments.
Tallulah isn’t a record that otherwise attempts to bring Feeder into 2019: a suspicion backed up by Kyoto, a baffling nu-metal detour that opens, strangely, with the line “cherry blossom … JAPANESE!” Instead, Nicholas and Hirose play to their strengths: unabashedly unfashionable guitar anthems with melodic MOR flourishes. “Wake up and feel the shape of love,” Nicholas implores on Kite, but this is an album that struggles to soar.
