The Strypes: Little Victories review – retro-rock teens still mired in the past

For their second album, the Strypes have boldly taken their sound several decades into the future. Unfortunately, this only takes them up to somewhere around 2005, so painstakingly retro was their debut album, Snapshot. The Irish teenagers’ old-school R&B stylings remain, but now co-exist alongside such bleeding-edge influences as Kasabian, Arctic Monkeys and the dozens of long-forgotten garage-rock revivalists who turned up to make a bit of a racket around the turn of the century. The resulting blend is not exactly a vital sound – all singalong ladrock choruses, harmonica solos and strained metaphors (“She’s the bag, she’s the leaves, she’s the sugar,” sings Ross Farrelly on I Need to Be Your Only, a song about how a girl is, well, what exactly? Half his cup of tea?). About as necessary as your MySpace password.