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The Asteroids Galaxy Tour - Fruit

Album Reviews

We'd like to say that this forms another arm of some sort of Scandinavian pop renaissance, but we fear this is reading too much into things.

Without being too harsh on 'Fruit' we can quite simply say that there are two types of song on this album. Firstly there is the bold brassy up-beat pop with a hefty influence from the summer of love and secondly there is hazy string laden pop with a hefty influence in the summer of love. Sometimes on 'Fruit' this is a formula that works, whilst at other times it's all too easy to let the album pass you by, doing nothing bar recalling chart-clogging bores such as Ronson or Duffy, but it seems that we can put this down to the dosage of trumpets and the blue-eyed soul feel.

The best of the up-beat songs that The Asteroids Galaxy Tour are peddling here is 'Around The Bend' which is probably familiar to most by now due to being used to sell iPods on the television for the past few months. It's bouncy and unbelievably catchy with hefty bursts of brass and a brilliant vocal performance. Without discussing the relative merits / horrors of having songs on such a commercial it's safe for us to say that this isn't all that The Asteroids Galaxy Tour have to offer. Of their slow type of song, 'The Sun Ain't Shining No More' is the best and is to all intents and purposes a facsimile of a 1960's Bond theme containing all of the soaring strings and sultry vocals that any association with such brings.

It would be quiet easy to lump The Asteroids Galaxy Tour in with other bands from their neck of the woods; after all, fellow Danes Alphabeat are currently riding high commercially whilst Swedish darlings Those Dancing Days are taking their fair shame of critical acclaim. We'd like to say that this forms another arm of some sort of Scandinavian pop renaissance, but we fear this is reading too much into things. However fans of any of the aforementioned or of The Concretes are certainly pointed in TAGTs direction.

Aside from a few filler tracks (most noticeably closing song 'Bad Fever' which really doesn't cut the mustard for such a important place on an album) 'Fruit' is a quite good album and an often pretty 1960s pop swirl. When listening to the quality of the pick of the bunch, songs such as 'Hero' and 'Push The Envelope' here it's easy to dismiss comparisons to most, if not all of their commercial contemporaries. It may have everything working against it but as a debut 'Fruit' certainly deserves a chance, even if in the long run only a few of the songs have replay value on a summer playlist / mixtape. Rating: 6/10