CD Review: The Grates, Gravity Won’t Get You High

You know how when one band gets popular, a wave of inferior bands copying the first band floods the market, like The Monkees copying The Beatles, Northern Uproar copying Oasis or The Fratellis copying The Libertines?

Well, on first appearance The Grates are an inevitable facsimile of Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It's all laid out for everyone to see - they're a three-piece new wavey-type band with a pretty girl singer who dresses a bit odd. As such, we expected Gravity Won't Get You High by The Grates to be a rush-job of Fever To Tell knock-offs and nothing more. How wrong we were - Gravity Won't Get You High by The Grates is a multicolour splurge of songs so strong they'll knock you into the gutter.

Here's a diverting little admission for you - up until about 10 minutes ago, all we knew about The Grates was their smashing little video for the song Science Is Golden that frankly won us over in a millisecond. But, in the name of sounding vaguely authoritative in these sorts of music reviews, we did a bit of research on The Grates. Now we know that The Grates have a brilliant video for the song Science Is Golden and think that anyone who spends £29 on a perspex toilet seat with razor blades in it is "lame". And they don't like Babysham. And they've made a pretty good album. And that's about it.

The relevant one of these - unless The Grates are coming round your house and you've got a perspex razor blade toilet that flushes Babysham - is the one about their album Gravity Won't Get You High being pretty good. And it is, too. Even in its dullest moments Gravity Won't Get You High by The Grates fizzes with the sort of uncontrollable restless energy that, if it were it a child, would have it Ritalined up to the eyes and kicked out of school for dancing on the desks.

You can hear this spirit right from the get-go; Gravity Won't Get You High opener I Won't Survive twats about like a bored kid in church and then buggers off after a minute, while Lies Are Much More Fun's sudden "I'm gonna go like this to you/ I'm gonna go like this to you/ I'm gonna go like this to you/ LALALALALA!" might just be the cheekiest pop moment you'll have heard for quite some time. Elsewhere on Gravity Won't Get You High, The Grates urge you to "use your bed like a trampoline" in Trampoline while admitting that "I lost my bra, think I lost yours too." But while moments like this suggest that being one of The Grates is a neverending carousel of childish fun, eventually the sugarcrash has to come - and when it does it's not pretty.

Being an Australian band, The Grates suffer from that inexplicable phenomenon of trying to sound like Nirvana, if only for a fleeting second or two. Thus, Gravity Won't Get You High's funbubble gets burst by Feels Like Pain, a lazy self-pitying Cobain-esque thrash that ruins the out-of-control propulsion that The Grates built up over the preceding seven tracks, and the band has to labour hard to find the same rush of gormless adventure after it ends.

Still, for an album that - yes, we know - came out in the middle of the summer, Gravity Won't Get You High by The Grates might just be the perfect thing you need to escape the tedium that comes with winter's 4pm sunsets.

Buy Gravity Won't Get You High by The Grates from Amazon