You love The Velvet Underground, don't you? Of course you do. Everyone loves The Velvet Underground. Even people who've never heard The Velvet Underground love The Velvet Underground. They're one of those bands, like The Beach Boys and The Smiths that no-one is allowed to criticise. Everyone secretly knows that The Beatles pissed all over all these other bands but there's nothing quite so cool as slightly unfulfilled potential. Except possibly being born poor. Or dying young. Anyway, guess what? The Concretes love The Velvet Underground, and they've just made an album all about how much they love The Velvet Underground.

I love The Concretes. From the first moments of "Say Something New" this album set a shiver running down my spine and it didn't let up even slightly for at least the first six back-to-back listens. "New Friend" is the most obviously Velvets influenced track on offer, although to be fair, The Concretes are not quite as two dimensional in their influences as I have implied. Titles like "You Can't Hurry Love" and "Diana Ross" reveal a Tamla Motown influence and tracks like "This One's For You" are reminiscent of the spacey psychedelia of Galaxie 500. However, much of this album can be defined simply by the term "great pop music".

Criticisms? On those rare moments where the melodies are unable to maintain quite the same high standard, as on the good but unspectacular "Chico", every young musician's annoyingly well-intentioned neighbour, the overenthusiastic string arrangement, attempts gamely to fill the gap but only succeeds in drawing too much attention to the deficit. But that's something that can be remedied in time. The Concretes have proven themselves masters of the fine craft of songsmithery and it is a craft that they will refine and improve on over their next few albums. This is a brilliant debut with every sign of better things to come. -Ian Martin, Feb.22.05.

The Concretes