If you’ve ever spent much time at the Hopetoun Hotel in Sydney, then you’ve likely seen a fair share of bands that sound just like The Devoted Few. These bands come and go like the wind, but then, records by similarly worthy indie rock bands do fill our JB Hi-Fi bargain bins. They’re the type of group that, after a few beers and a blistering 40-minute set, your enthusiastic mate will opine are “going places”. Then again, this often means they carry the pungent stench of being marketable. Just where these bands go is sometimes hard to track, but so far The Devoted Few have gone as far as Nashville, Tennessee, where Kings of Leon mixer Jacquire King “polished to perfection” their third album, Baby You’re A Vampire.

By generic standards, it’s a good album. It shouldn’t end up in bargain bins: at the very least it ought to be lapped up by fans of anything King has laid his golden fingers on. If the formula pursued here resolves correctly it should be big, because it’s anthemic and riddled with reliable hooks. At the same time, it’s also yet another indie rock record where indeed, every potential jagged edge, every compelling uncertainty, any risque sensibility, have been determinably polished away.

Still, the five-piece is diverse sonically, but the variety only leaves more opportunities to draw direct comparisons with US indie alumni such as Arcade Fire, Interpol, Pixies – even Kings of Leon. Unlike those groups, Benjamin Fletcher’s rustic, manly voice lacks any charismatic eccentricity. He’s yet – and it’s frankly getting too late by this stage, in this guise – to find a register we can take to heart. He tries his hand at outraged world weariness (‘Trigger Fingers’), paranoia (‘Listen To Us’) and vague melancholia (‘You & Me & Everywhere Else We Know’) but neither the words nor the delivery amount to more than a rope that guides through the pedestrian musical landscape. For the one truly convincing moment on Baby, You’re A Vampire, look no further than ‘Tom Said’, where Fletcher’s lyrics ascend into uncharacteristically candid heights. It’s a small narrative decorated by tiny monologues; grippingly poignant compared to what surrounds it.

Indie rock is a resilient beast. It used to mean something sonically, but nowadays if something is marketed as indie, it will generally be consumed as such – even when the way this album has been “polished” sounds as if it aspires to the heights of Triple M mediocrity. The Devoted Few evidently learnt their sonic vocabulary from the bluntest moments of this increasingly frail tradition. They fail to inspire because their enunciation, their posture and their execution is too worthy.

In a time when Australian indie rock records are still a dime a dozen, Baby You’re A Vampire repels excitement because it has no discernable identity. It’s a yardstick against which to compare similar albums imbued with real personality.

by Shaun Prescott