Oh God. Oh God. I can't stand this.

It's taken a week and a half to steel myself into writing something about this. It's just... oh God.

Sometimes mediocrity is something you can ignore. Radio music. David Gray et al. It's there but you'd never know - your brain has learned to filter it out like an unwanted byproduct. Sometimes it's so self-destructively offensive in its beigeness that you can slag it to shit and know you never have to listen to it ever again.

And sometimes it falls below any of that. It leaves you devoid of ANY reaction whatsoever - And yet you have to put something down on paper.

So. Black Car. For want of a better word, it's "nice". It doesn't deserve a more descriptive word than "nice". "Morose", perhaps, if you're feeling generous. That's as good as it gets. It sounds like Turin Brakes without the faint [and ever waning] sense of oddity that used to vaguely identify them. It sounds like the sound of polite young men who listen with awe to Radiohead and Travis and think that because they have acoustic guitars and passable voices they can produce something of the same measure. It sounds like those same young men, however many studio hours later, grinning proudly with no comprehension of exactly what they have failed to achieve.

Some records evade description - their inventiveness renders the English language's stock of descriptive words redundant. Others fail to necessitate any of those words. This is one such record.