Dear Reviewer
Having found your excellent website...

Before going any further here's a tip for Instant Species and any other bands looking for positive media coverage. If you're going to send a standard letter to every website you approach do not even hint that you've written to that website especially. It's a standard letter, it implies you're sending out a lot of them, otherwise you'd have spent the necessary 3 seconds to replace "reviewer" with my name and "your excellent website" with Drowned In Sound. In fact, don't send covering letters. I'd rather have a biog and a quick "hope you enjoy this andy" scribbled in biro on a post-it. Right, lecture over.

Instant Species hail from Huddersfield, are four in number, and are 50% bold. Their promo photo has them looking ironically hard, shades, black shirts and striped school ties. Three of them could be Busted a decade or two on. Musically it's fairly inoffensive indie rock typical of people who've graduated from teenage angst to adult resignation. Lots of tunes about relationships backed with a limited number of effects pedals and a down to earth vocal that doesn't have issues with going high when necessary. It's honest but it lacks style, they sound like a band who practice on Sunday afternoon rather than one that lives and breathes any kind of dream. 'Jamaica Park' seems particularly guilty of this; featuring reggae ska-lite, it keeps slipping back into standard pop rock. The inclusion of clichés from other genres shows an altogether too conscious effort being made to add variety to their sound. Many of the best bands fuse influences from a vast array of genres to awesome effect (Primal Scream and Gorillaz being two). Instant Species, however, are more like the the local band down the road who describe their songs as "the ska song, the nu metal song, the punk song" etc. Except, to their credit, not that bad.

They're good at what they do and no doubt their local following love them for it, but on a wider platform I can't see them making much impact.