Such is the brouhaha provoked by Technique in their brief career that one might innocently suppose it had something to do with their music, and absolutely nothing with the fact that 50% of Technique is married to the owner of their record label, Creation. While it would be fatuous to claim that the music industry is any more prone to nepotism than, say, the media, the real issue here is not that Kate Holmes happens to be Mrs Alan McGee but that her group has been signed by anyone, let alone the decade's pre-eminent patron of maverick quality and style.

It's not that Technique lack many of the traditional prerequisites for pop success. There are those who regard the presence of two good-looking women at a band's creative core as a virtue in itself, and in the faintly down-at-heel 100 Club Holmes and partner Xan Tyler certainly dominate proceedings. The impassive Holmes controls her songs' lush, synthesised pulse from behind her keyboard, while Tyler emotes in that showy, arms-akimbo fashion so unfortunately typical of former session vocalists.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the music either: emotive, minor-key anthems to love and its attendant complications, with titles like Sun is Shining and choruses that imply that the sun may actually be doing no such thing.

Yet Technique have taken more than their name from the 10-year-old album on which New Order refined their blend of angst and drug-fuelled dancefloor hedonism to near perfection. So closely does Holmes's basic template resemble the Mancunians' groovy melancholia, not to mention that of the Pet Shop Boys (tellingly, all three bands have been produced by Stephen Hague), that it borders on the redundant. On occasions she'll fiddle with a gizmo, which disrupts the seamless flow, but otherwise it's only the closing Quiet Storm, with its grumpy swathes of distortion, that alerts one to the additional onstage presence of a guitarist and drummer. Even then, Technique can fathom nothing more outre than the politely deported techno-rock of Garbage.