A flurry of piano rises like a tornado in slow motion, promising a break into some much longed-for catharsis, release- before paling back to reedy acoustic strumming. It's nice, isn't it?' That rhetorical pleasantry precedes 'Something Good' and just as listeners might be about to staple their collars shut for good, the song comes in with a speedy Arab Strap-morose guitar part, and singer Joe Newman uses the language of the bullring ('matador,' 'estocada') to describe how he's going to vanquish some unwanted lingering feelings. a car park? The bleep of a lorry reversing prompts a woman to comment, 'It's good today. The second of the record's three interludes is a finger-picked acoustic guitar melody, played over field recordings of. In Alt-J's case, there was never any vim to quash in the first place. Alt-J have also been compared to Wild Beasts, and while there's a superficial similarity between both bands' oddly voiced singers, when Wild Beasts hold back- as they did on the majestic Smother- it's because they know that priapism would be inappropriate at that particular moment.

The most frustrating thing about An Awesome Wave is its tentativeness. This was neatly proven earlier this week when Mumford & Sons covered 'Tessellate' in the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge, the single sounding indistinguishable from their own material. But these additions rarely forge any sense of dynamic or structural progression strip all extraneous sparkle and amplification away, and the songs are exposed for the draining, elongated MOR tunes they really are. The Cambridge-based, Leeds-formed band thinks nothing of layering on ever more crunchy drumbeats, metallic thuds on the piano, and constellations of sparkle as another knotty rhythm stutters forth: Woody cracks fracture the end of 'Tessellate', a cloud of synths smother the final moments of 'Breezeblocks', and some incongruous surf guitar twangs over the last seconds of 'Taro'. 'In your snatch fits pleasure, broom-shaped pleasure,' for one. Comprehensible intonation is out of the window, which is probably a good job seeing as very few of the lyrics make any kind of sense. Sometimes they sound like Bombay Bicycle Club playing in a submarine.

The notion of a male vocal that's halfway between Macy Gray and a goose gibbering over beats discarded from * Eskimo Snow-*era WHY? is certainly a complex notion. The main claim for innovation on Alt-J's debut, An Awesome Wave, is that there's a lot going on. As Radiohead would tell you, popularity doesn't preclude you from being experimental, but that Alt-J are being hailed as horndogs for innovation speaks volumes about the neutered, post- Maccabees peerage they've entered into.

They're the favorites to winВ the ВЈ10,000 accolade of November's Mercury Music Prize. We just try to play music we like to hear.' Where's my 'And if anyone else likes it, that's a bonus' klaxon? In Alt-J's case, those are some pre-banking crisis-sized bonuses: Their album has gone Top 20 in the UK, and single 'Tessellate' has been all over radio on both sides of the Atlantic for months. It is a contradiction in terms that the band described by some as 'the new Radiohead' are prone to statements such as, 'Part of the reason is accessible is because we don't try to go out of the box or be innovative.

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