#4: Does It Offend You, Yeah? - You Have No Idea What You're Getting Yourself Into (2008)

1. Battle Royale
2. With A Heavy Heart (I Regret To Inform You)
3. We Are Rockstars
4. Dawn Of The Dead
5. Doomed Now
6. Attack Of The 60 Ft Lesbian Octopus
7. Let's Make Out
8. Being Bad Feels Pretty Good
9. Weird Science
10. Epic Last Song

Not much to say about this one - I pre-ordered the album in the hope of being able to listen to it before their gig in Newcastle at the end of March, but due to my stupidly small letterbox (yes, really) I didn't get to hear it until afterwards. I've seen them live a few times, so comparisons between the record and the live show are inevitable. This review somehow feels like a bit of a cop-out, but as I'd half-written it in my head already there doesn't seem to be much point in delaying it, particularly as they're very much a band of the moment.

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Does It Offend You, Yeah? are the type of band who attract the ire of some music fans merely for their David Brent inspired moniker. But would they be right to direct the same negativity towards their music? While You Have No Idea What You're Getting Yourself Into may provide fuel for the fire for some, for me it's a decent, if ultimately somewhat shallow record.

It's fair to say this is an album of two halves, the first half being the type of song that first brought them to my attention some months ago: It only seems appropriate that the album begins with such as song (the first one they ever wrote, in fact). 'Battle Royale' is a straightforward electro-rock number built around simple synth riffs and pounding beats: Lacking subtlety and hardly containing a great deal of substance, but good fun nonetheless. At the other end of the album, 'Weird Science' pulls much the same trick, albeit with more going on in general and synths that sound like a malfunctioning robot gargling sludge. 'We Are Rockstars' also comes from the same stable, with the twist being that it features warped vocals that take a jab at Internet posers: "Where's your real friends now? You have let them down, you're a download pal." However, it's this song that loses the most in the transition from the live stage, with the shouts of "Yeah!" sounding muted and the impact of the song's crunching riffs somehow lost a little.

The second half of this album, on the other hand, feels like it wants to be a synth-pop album. This is first evidenced on 'Dawn Of The Dead', which features a semi-memorable hook and some potentially moving sentiment, but not a lot else of note. 'Being Bad Feels Pretty Good' suffers much the same fate, starting out well enough with a searing guitar riff but then managing to drift by without making much of an impact. Their best shot at this type of track comes with album-closer 'Epic Last Song': It's still not their most memorable of tracks, but it feels more fleshed out compared to the other two similar efforts, with the elements of the song combining to create a decent take on synth-pop. Overall though, this direction doesn't feel as successful as their other tracks - they're the kind of songs that are perfectly listenable, but if you didn't know who they were by you probably wouldn't care enough to find out.

Sometimes, however, the songs fall between these two camps, or even somewhere else entirely. 'Doomed Now' sounds a bit like Devo's 'Whip It' covered by androids from a post-apocalyptic future, while 'Attack Of The 60 Ft Lesbian Octopus' is a bizarre interlude, caught somewhere between an 80's TV show theme and 90's video game pastiche. 'Let's Make Out', meanwhile, is a vicious, sexed up, cowbell-thrashing beast, which by the end has synths glitching all over the place and Morgan positively screaming out the vocals (something which is lost in the live performance, making this song a little better on record in my opinion).

Their best tune though, is 'With A Heavy Heart (I Regret To Inform You)'. It sits closer to the first school of songs with its heavy bassline and stabs of guitar, while vocals wail distortedly before cries of "Oh God" build up like a cross between an orgasm and a mental breakdown - and then the song goes berserk with the spasm-inducing sound of crunching guitars and synths aborting themselves.

Some might argue that there's not much longevity in this band. But does it matter? This is a record that makes sense now, in a post-'new rave' climate, and the band aren't particularly setting their stall out to become some sort of legends. The only ears Does It Offend You, Yeah? are going to be offending are those of parents across the country, and possibly those who prefer their music with a bit more depth or lasting sentiment. For everyone else, this is simply a fun record to listen to, have a dance around to if the mood takes you, and then probably forget about shortly afterwards.