After last year’s ‘In Time To Voices’ found Blood Red Shoes’ brand of bratty punk polished to a high shine, the Brighton duo have now made a bid for “pure, badass, rock’n’roll immediacy”. Their words. In a way, they’ve been pretty successful – the only problem is that among the punk-rock rubble, the choruses have been buried completely too. The tracks on ‘Water’ may be crawling with riffs, but without the rousing, infectious choruses that made Blood Red Shoes so bloody exciting in the first place, it seems like a bit of a pointless exercise all round. The storming ‘Black Distraction’ comes closest to recapturing the band’s former, feverish appeal, but unfortunately the rest of it is a bit of a dirge.
Katherine Rodgers