With their namesake, bassist Daniel Fenech-Soler, having exited the band last year alongside fellow co-founder Andrew Lindsay, these days the Northamptonshire outfit operate solely as a vehicle for the remaining members, brothers Ross and Ben Duffy. Zilla is the third album in the band’s career, which began promisingly in 2010 with a track called Stop and Stare, a nicely melodic slice of synth-laden electropop. With nothing since then having made much of an impact, Zilla feels like the brothers’ attempt to breath new life into the band. In some ways they have succeeded: this record is energetic, hook-filled and sonically diverse enough to not to lapse into the uniformity that blights so much of the genre. But it also operates in a generic no man’s land – not novel enough to pass for pure pop, not cold and perfunctory enough for faceless EDM, not experimental enough to qualify as interesting alternative fare – and, ultimately, not quite distinctive enough to excite on its own terms.
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