The Vines: Winning Days

But here comes The Vines again, in more ways than one carrying on as if Highly Evolved never happened. Winning Days accompanies yet another wave of delirious attention, and again includes a mere handful of fine songs to go with gobs of forgettable, decidedly far-from-revolutionary material. Winning Days opens and closes with nicely pungent blasts of amp-smashing rock ("Ride" and "Fuck The World," respectively), but the album's midsection—in other words, just about everything between the first song and the last song—sags under the weight of midtempo, middle-of-the-road throwaways. The title track, a gracefully brooding pop gem, breaks up the monotony along the way, but that song has a lot of decent but unspectacular filler to make up for.

Given singer Craig Nicholls' notoriously mercurial, unhinged persona, The Vines ought to be a damn sight more compelling than Winning Days lets on. As it is, all this sound and occasional fury adds up to yet another well-coifed also-ran, with a stack of press clippings, a few highlights for Best Of The '00s compilations, and little else to go on.