Album Review // Good Shoes - No Hope, No Future

When you’ve been away for three years, the pressure is on for you to grab the notorious second album by the proverbial horns and drag it into a world where you’ve matured, the fans from your debut still burst with adoration and hordes of new listeners become hooked. But it can be bloody hard, which is demonstrated by a catalogue of one hit wonders throughout musical history and unfortunately Good Shoes’ follow up is no exception. In a contrived attempt to feign that they’ve gone and ‘done a Maccabees’, the second album has been stripped of the staple prepubescent charm that once made this London four-piece so endearing, leaving the ten new tracks drip rather bleakly with disenchantment. The pheromone-rich ‘Under Control’ leans towards the boy-ish charisma of pastures once visited and nostalgic ‘Do you Remember?’ smacks of their previous tales of Landan Town. But whilst rich with sporadic guitar riffs and snippets of familiarity, the rest of the album is smothered by a melancholy miserablism that hovers like a rather disappointing shadow.