My verdict? Holy mother of god, what the hell are these people thinking? This is, hand’s down, the absolute worst album I’ve ever listened to more than once. And frankly, if I hadn’t agreed to review it I would never have made it past the first song. Imagine somehow re-animating the rotting corpse of Edith Piaf, giving it the brain of a four-year-old, and telling it to make a Bjork album; I feel confident that what you’d end up with would be Noah’s Ark. This is drug music for Teletubbies, infantile autistic indie cretinism of the worst sort.

I mentioned to my editrix that the album was somewhat suboptimal. She replied that she’d meant to send me a track she’d downloaded. Since all their songs were the same, surely I could extrapolate from that? Ultimately, though, couldn’t the whole sorry enchilada be summed up as “boring”?

Oh, if “boring” were the only problem here we’d be home free.

Those of you who’ve read my reviews in the past know that I go out of my way to find something positive to say. There’s enough negativity in the world, I know what it’s like to make something and put it out for all to comment on, etc. But fuck me running, this album doesn’t leave me much to work with. The songs are virtually indistinguishable in their lugubrious, sing-song monotony. Some are backed by a harp (the big stringed instrument, not the harmonica), some by piano, some by acoustic guitar, some by combinations thereof. Some have some beats plastered over them, but most don’t. Oh, “Bear Hides and Buffalo” has some sort of Fisher-Price sample of moo-cows mooing, horsies neighing, and kitty-cats meowing. That kinda stands out.

Every song, sadly, features Bianca Cassidy’s unfortunate vocals – invariably a soulless, childish (in every sense of the word) pastiche of Billie Holliday. Some also have her sister, Sierra, adding some operatic vibrato. It’s all excruciating, the rapping in French on “Bisounours” doubly so. Well, the harp playing isn’t bad, really, but in a pop music context it’s a fairly limited instrument. And that’s about the best I can do here.

This year’s poster boy for the terminally pathetic, Antony Johnson, provides vocals on the chorus of “Beautiful Boyz”. Devendra Banhart appears somewhere, too, but since I DL’d the thing I don’t have any liner notes to work with.

I can delete the files from my computer, I can break the disc I burned (and believe me, I will do both those things once I finish writing this review), but the psychic scars of listening to this pretentious, self-indulgent crap are going to be with me for a long, long time. Repeated playing of it is like sitting down to what has been billed as a luscious dinner, only to be presented with a loaded diaper on a plate. See what I made for you?

When I invoked the Teletubbies earlier, it’s the developmentally immature aspect of the record that I had in mind. And that aspect is there every time Bianca opens her mouth. Trust me on this.

There seems to be a certain subset of (yes, I’ll say it) hipster who think that eternal pre-sexuality is not only possible but desirable. Now, as a man just under three months shy of his 45th birthday who almost literally ran out to buy the new Big Star album when it was released yesterday, the concept of arrested adolescence is not lost on me. Mea culpa. That said, at least adolescents are on the cusp of adulthood, their reach often exceeding their grasp; these arrested toddlers seem bent on avoiding maturity of any sort.

And I can sort of see where they’re coming from, really. The adult world is a scary one, full of death, disease, war, terror, deceit, and, most dreaded of all, personal responsibility. Children have none of these worries falling down on their heads. Mummy and Daddy will always be there to chase off the boogieman and make everything fun and safe again. Deep down, I think we can all resonate with that desire, on some level.

I hate to be the one to break the news, kids, but eventually you have to leave the playpen. Life is just unavoidable, no matter how much you may want to duck it. Sooner or later it will grab you by the scruff of the neck and drag you, kicking and screaming, into the Real World. Don’t worry, though. At the end, you get to wear diapers again.