I was unsure what to expect of this debut album from Texas’ Sound Team, with their quirky insistence on inverted commas around the title – that’s “Movie Monster”  – and a press blurb that told me to “file [them] somewhere between Kraftwerk and Talking Heads”, I was somewhat dubious. The 76 second opening track, ‘Get Out’, did little to reassure me; but as the album went on I was pleasantly surprised to find the press release’s advice relatively apt – and not just in an alphabetical sense.

The six-piece include the traditional guitars plus keyboards and synths and obviously draw from a rather wide range of influences, which have combined to produce an diverse album, that ranges from spiky punk-rock to gentler almost-AOR numbers. Front man Matt Oliver has a knack for coming out with some fairly random stream-of-consciousness-type nonsense, but against the jarring instruments it works.

Hook-laden recent single ‘Born To Please’ neatly encapsulates the band’s more commercial rock side. Their two extremes are demonstrated by ‘Shattered Glass’, which represents the band’s heavier moments, and mellow, melodic songs like ‘Afterglow Years’ or ‘You’ve Never Lived A Day’, which could grace the soundtrack to something like The O.C. The title-song, on the other hand, is a rather weird, experimental number, lacking much in the way of tune or energy, but with a strange charm of its own, even if not as immediate as the others mentioned.

For all their eclecticism and exuberance, what’s perhaps most surprising is that this is a consistent album that doesn’t suffer from a lack of overall coherence. Somehow the band are able to bring together a range of different styles, but blend them all into their own sound, creating an album that is at least the sum of its parts and, more importantly, flows.
(4/5)