It was easy enough to forgive The Vines' second album, Winning Days, for not living up to their debut. Many bands fail to escape a sophomore slump, and it was still halfway decent despite its dismal failure both critically and commercially. The album's wake (or lack there of) was disastrous for the band: lead singer Craig Nichols was slapped with an unfortunate assault charge, diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome—a mild form of autism in which people essentially have trouble getting along with others—and his best friend, Patrick Matthews, quit the band. The remaining group members cancelled their U.S. tour, hung their heads and headed back to Australia. Now, two years later, they've spewed out Vision Valley, an insipidly boring disappointment.
Vision Valley is so awful that it accomplishes something truly rare: It makes one question and renounce the validity of the band's entire catalogue. This may not seem to be a fair reaction, but consider this: The Vines basically sound the same here as they did on their debut, Highly Evolved. Some minute changes occurred—probably the tempering of Nichols' insanity that made that debut compelling, even endearing—and now the balance has been upset, the sham exposed for what it really is. After all, The Vines have never been anything more than a well thought-out whoring of The Beatles and Nirvana, adept at throwing those colossal influences together in blatant, unholy matrimony. On Highly Evolved, there was enough charm and pop spunk to make it respectable, at least in some base sense, but now the songs are flat and placid.
The hard stuff is briefly entertaining but soon grating, while the slow breezy Brit-pop is utterly forgettable. Many songs sound like brief ideas that need development, almost nonexistent in their under-two-minute misconception. The first single, Don't Listen To The Radio,\ is one of few decent tracks, a sunshiny piece of pop swagger in which Nichols informs us that he doesn't listen to the radio, watch TV or apparently use a telephone. He better hope people are listening to the radio though; by now The Vines' fan base has so dwindled that a radio single is the only thing bound to move any copies of Vision Valley at all.
The minute-long ""Gross Out"" is great thrashed-out grunge punk. This song's short length smacks of efficiency rather than lack of development, and the bare-bones sentiment of the lyrics follows suit: ""I feel so down / Time bring me ‘round."" A brief glimpse of the wild, uncontainable Craig Nichols of old shows through as he belts the words out with one hell of a sneer.
The track leads into the heavily Pavement-derivative ""Take Me Back,"" in which Nichols sings something that seems to perfectly capture Vision Valley and the current state of The Vines: ""There's no point in doing what I've done.""
This lazy attitude pervades throughout the album. He offers some optimistic words at the end, ""The road is long but I know I can survive,"" yet at their current rate, survival in the music industry seems unlikely. Vision Valley makes one thing clear: Whatever synergy and charisma propelled The Vines to stardom is now just plain used up.
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