Frank - Devil's Got Your Gold (Polydor)

Try as you might, there’s no escaping the lure of reality television. A rather bold assertion given that Big Brother is currently reaching its stalest, but throw a dash of pop into the mix and you’re hooked. The X-Factor, Fame Academy, Making the Band – ace on a fucking stick.

Yet mix pop with fiction and you’re heading for full-on cataclysmic torment of all five senses. Frank – a band whom we’ve already provided a deserving downpour of abuse for – leak through the constraints of their Godawful T4 “drama” to bring us their debut album. And the results, we’re not at all surprised to say, are not good.

High on gloss, low on charisma and entirely mundane as far as musical capability is concerned, Frank prove that their supposed craft is as beige as their springboard show. The marvellously-titled Devil’s Got Your Gold does nothing to match the excitement of its moniker.

Electro-nods and pleasantly simple melodies are incapable of carrying a mammoth deficiency of imagination and personality. The monotone muddle of Never Left A Girl, the desperate trippy endeavours of Silence... it’s not even music worth disliking. It’s just there.



Seemingly compiled entirely from offcuts scavenged from the Xenomania dustbins, we’re presented with a collection of songs too dull for the Sugababes and too mature for Girls Aloud. Take Money In My Pocket, a single touted for in-house surl-girl duo Mania: an aloof, ballsy, eye-rollingly accomplished track which becomes a lifeless audition for Italia Conti’s B-class in the club hands of Frank.

Industry sycophants will no doubt claim that Frank are light years ahead of their time when the excuses are to be made for their inevitable polishing off, but perhaps the problem is that this music isn’t of a particular time. Or genre. Or style. Frank are too embarrassingly nonspecific to work in any format, ever.

So, it would appear the telly show gimmick really doesn’t carry much weight. Not that it ever has – did North & South teach us nothing?