The Electric Soft Parade - No Need To Be Downhearted

It’s electrifying...and soft

By Tom Victor

It’s now four years since The Electric Soft Parade’s second – and most recent – album. Given such a long time to work on a follow-up, one might expect the end result to be much better than No Need To Be Downhearted.

This tame offering simply makes us wonder what the band was doing in theintervening period. Admittedly some of the tracks are perfectly pleasant, however too few of them possess the spark of early singles like There’s A Silence, the likes of which gained this Brighton band great notoriety at the start of the century. Indeed with the exception of Misunderstanding and the lively Cold World, there is nothing on this album that you would recognise if you heard it again. Even these tracks are not really up to The Electric Soft Parade’s previous high standards, and this really serves to emphasise the lack of progress made.

I fear this may be the end of the line for The Electric Soft Parade, which is a shame after the promise they showed early in their career.