Isn’t it splendid when artists are so helpful as to provide a handy visual equivalent of the succeeding album as the album’s cover itself? _Loveless_ had a guitar awashed in pink, _The Queen Is Dead_ had a black and white shot of Alain Delon in _L'insoumis_, and **Flipron** have the sickly union of light green and chocolate brown; a union that is sadly indicative of neither a life-changing distorted glory or melancholic musings, but instead an uncomfortably awkward mixture. Saves time, no?

Reduced to its bare components it’s not a bad album as such, but one that, like the colours green and brown aligned horizontally, is the unfortunate, messy product of a too varied base of influences; to create an album that passes through Syd Barrett, Neutral Milk Hotel and Half Man Half Biscuit takes expert control and discipline which Flipron just don’t possess. On _'Youth Shall Never Beat Old Age In A Race'_ and _'The Man Who Was Eaten By A Pie'_, the jarring sounds of the group’s musical upbringing overwhelm the listener in a barrage of eclecticism, diluting the album’s focus in a heap of faux-wackiness.

In the presence of the accompanying lyric book however, it’s clear Flipron are skilled wordsmiths - perfectly weighted and fluently charismatic, lyrics like, _"You're like Jesus Christ meets Hamlet meets Robin Hood"_, and _"When you're a multi-headed hellhound with a reputation for rage / The sympathies of those who meet are hard to engage"_ are very much early-Pink Floyd, with a dash of the poet Benjamin Zephaniah. Once thrown into the overflowing pool of ideas that make up _Biscuits For Cerberus_, however, and ejected from the mouth of Jesse Budd into his put-upon ‘dirty blues’ growl, it becomes unremittingly irritating. A book of poetry, perhaps, could be a viable substitute for the next album…

Flashes of cohesion as in _‘Dogboy Vs. Monsters’_ are far too rare and in their future ventures Flipron would do well to perhaps divide their love of differing genres into a series of projects. The search for an excellent band of music aficionados continues…