The run of singles Everything Everything released before unleashing their debut album, ‘Man Alive’, made a lot of people sit up and take notice. Starting in 2008 with ‘Suffragette Suffragette’, the band seemed to have something that made them stand out from the indie hordes that populate the British music scene. Admittedly that something was that they didn’t sound like: a) Arctic Monkeys; b) Klaxons; and c) their music was dictated by the tightness of their jeans and the tattered states of their fedoras. The song was all choppy build-ups, catchy vocals which speared notes higher than comfort should ever allow, and lyrics which verged on the avant-garde (a personal favourite was, ‘Oh pedigree chum, pedigree chum I’m never your father’). In 2009 came ‘Photoshop Handsome’ – a track which featured an intro out of the N*E*R*D textbook of synth-led funk, before developing into something more chaotic – along with the radio friendly album opener ‘MY KZ, UR BF’. It was an impressive haul of singles, but was there enough to make an album or would it be just that: a collection of singles? It’s a tough one to call. While EE are definitely more DAB friendly pop than Wild Beasts – coming across as a more thrashed-out, guitar orientated version of Passion Pit (perhaps the reliance on falsetto accounts for some of that comparison) – and the hits are undoubtedly dotted throughout the record, the album tracks, the ones we know won’t be getting airplay, don’t really stand out enough to support the crowd-pleasers. ‘Come Alive Diana’ sounds like The Smiths colliding with Hall and Oates: a sound which doesn’t sit too well in anyone’s cochlea. ‘Final Form’ and ‘Nasa is on your Side’ also don’t quite hit the mark, with the band seemingly caught in a quandary: do we make radio gold, or do we do something more introverted? In the end they do both and it doesn’t always work. Tracks like the jerking, changeable, indie-disco ‘Schoolin’’ are always going to redeem though, and on the whole ‘Man Alive’ is a fine chunk of pop. DS