Turin Brakes have a made pretty impressive name of themselves in a relatively short amount of time. Comprised of Olly Knights and Gale Paridjanian's TB's first record The Optimist made a critical splash and found it's way onto the shortlist for Best Newcomer at the annual British Music Industry awards, which boosted it's sale and garnered their full length debut a Mercury nomination.

They didn't win either of these awards, but the exposure they gained would help them develop a quick following and soon they were touring in support of Doves. Though I knew better when I first started listening to The Optimist I kept forgetting that I was listening to a man. Olly's vocal range flows into Alto range with ease and everyone I tried to convince they were listening to a man would scoff in disbelief.

This must have come to the attention to the execs at Astrelwerks, because quite ironically Ether Song finds Olly's voice floating way down. You wouldn't mistake his voice for that of a woman's on any of these tracks, but you would mistake him for James Walsh of Starsailor, or Kelly Jones of the Stereophonics. It's almost as if they sat these guys down in front of the blue-print of Starsailor's Love is Here and said, we want you to sound exactly like this.

Perhaps this is just a coincidence, but compared to the more rocking and varied the Optimist, Ether Song is a snoozer for me. Not that Starsailor's debut was a bad album, quite the contrary - but it's already been made. Ether Song represents a play-it-safe progression that would best be described as the same sort of follow up that Travis' The Invisible Band was to The Man Who . . . it's still pretty good stuff, but just undoubtedly watered-down same-ish and bland.

Though I wouldn't call this album a bust by any means, I'd be hard-pressed to tell you which was my favorite song (though I've listened to it repeatedly) because it's all so homogenous. Personally I don't care if Olly sounds like Holly as long at their music is a little more challenging. I would recommend it highly to insomniacs.