'The English Riviera' is certainly still capable of surprising you, but for the most part it will stick, albeit sometimes loosely, to this tone. Explosions of electronic-energy are followed by lulls of bass-guitar driven outros. Metronomy create a tone somewhere in between calm and wistful. Too often there will be an array of obligatory songs (an instrumental, a ballad, an acoustic/piano one etc.) that usually come across as uninspired, ,present only for the sake of filling out space and at worse completely jarring. One of the hardest things to do with an album such as this is to find a tone and to stick to it. With 'The English Riviera', Metronomy don't exactly break the mold, but they do provide an incredibly solid set of songs that will stay with you long after you expect them to. Truth be told, it never needed to be deep all that ever mattered was making a song that made you smile and was easy to listen to. This isn't a genre known for being deep: it's saturated with (not-so-)witty one liners, easy-to-strum-to guitar parts and too many synthesizers to count. I'm impressed with my own observation there, it's very poignant at least, that is until Metronomy came along and released one of the best Indie Pop albums I've ever set my ears to. It's depressing really, a genre based of innovation stagnating at such a fast rate. There hasn't been a stand out album from the genre for a few years now and every album sounds exactly like the last, if even a little worse. It's gotten to the stage where just having the label of Indie Pop is enough to turn me off a band.

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