The Vaccines – Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations Review

Follow Cult Following

Get more of our coverage in Google.

Remember The Vaccines? No? Well, here they are again. A broken clock strikes right twice, The Vaccines once every three years. Their latest offering, Pink Carnations, is a fine enough affair. Once more on the merry-go-round of indie rock. The last time the band was let out of their cage, they offered a meandering setlist of unchanged indie rock melodies. This time, though. Nothing has changed. Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations is as asinine as it sounds. Dead flowers in the back of a beat-up truck. How romantic. Considering the association with spirited country bouts, the flowery-clad vehicle and the open road ahead, you would be forgiven for believing The Vaccines were a band hailing from California, not West London where pub-owning pals helped them find their footing. 

But ever since Arctic Monkeys laid the foundation for branching off into the other parts of the world, a Stateside nod without the visitation rights on career peak Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino, other bands are keen to follow suit without the chops or charisma to do so. Hence the continued, battered efforts of former number-one artists The Vaccines, whose 2011 peak speaks for itself. Barely clocking a half-hour on this, the urgency at which tracks like Sometimes, I Swear and Heartbreak Kid are flittered out are of the mortgage deadline panic variety. In just three minutes and thirty-eight seconds, Sometimes, I Swear, rushes through several different genres in the hopes of clinging to something while being swept down the river of irrelevancy. No such look, their percussion and electric-heavy effort here does nothing.  

Not one of these songs sounds specific to The Vaccines. Flickers of a Noel Gallagher vocal style and an instrumental period of generic indie anthems flutter through, the plain toast music of a talent plucked by The Inbetweeners and forgotten soon after. Barely any variation from track to track with the same slick and tired guitar work and the back-and-forth of a man hoping to be himself yet cannot, because he lost himself six albums ago and never recovered. Annoyingly vacant of life and going through the motions as they have done for over a decade. Nothing about The Vaccines strikes as frightening or exciting, they are a band wrapped in bubble wrap and safe to throw around because there is no chance of an implosion or new sound wafting through. It is what makes Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations so draining.  

For those whose ears were never graced by songs up until today, The Vaccines will be new to you. Others, those who have experienced sound, thought and music elsewhere, will find nothing new in this collection of vapid songs. Tangled-up terrors with love interests on Sunkissed give some thoroughly empty shells another fatal blow. The Vaccines are tapping their foot along to a ridiculous sense of entitlement. Here they are with ten more songs of the same flavour, and in return their demands are obvious. Chart slots, big hits and the glory days slipped through their fingers far too long ago. No reinvention, just another chase of the inevitable. It makes for a boring listen, more than anything. But to hear a band go through the motions for over a decade, as The Vaccines have, is rather tragic.