Every year they come, wan-faced desperadoes who all too willingly pronounce themselves saviours of that raddled old nag we know as rock 'n' roll. A decade ago it was the Manic Street Preachers, and now another quartet of angry young men has emerged from the badlands of south Wales, bristling with righteous interview indignation at the hopelessness of "this coma of modern life", safe in the certainty that only they can restore the soul.
You can't fault Terris for their ambition, nor deny the Newport quartet's supreme competence for the job in hand. Singer Gavin Goodwin is the Exocet in their arsenal, a bleached-blond rag doll whose appropriation of Michael Stipe's semaphore dance acts as the visual conduit for his colleagues' taut bluster. That he sings like a cow in labour enthrals and appals in equal measure.
Underpinned by Neil Dougmore's busy analogue bass pulse, and with guitarist Alun Bound lashing out angular chops from his Fender, the effect is very much as if REM's synthetic folly Monster had been their first album and not the eighth: overwrought powerplay minus the leavening properties of irony.
Impressive, for sure, but it soon becomes clear that Terris currently represent a triumph of style over content. Their press invokes the spirit of Joy Division, yet at a push they could maybe give Reef a run for their money. No amount of arms-akimbo grandstanding from Goodwin can atone for their lack of a single diamond-hard tune to wrap around the memory.
Gauche and derivative they may have been, but at least the fledgling Manics came forearmed with a school satchel's worth of ready-made doomed-youth anthems. In comparison, Terris can offer only the drilling mayhem of Searching for the Switches, where Goodwin's theatrics are upstaged by the goggle-eyed savagery of Owen Matthews, an honours graduate from the Keith Moon school of mad drummers. And when the star of the show is the drummer, something is plainly amiss.
With the music industry desperate for young heroes to worship, Terris look like a champion youth club band, prematurely thrown into the fray and winging it gamely. Not so much the future of rock as an indictment of its present malaise.
