Playlouder - Music is the Network

You can tell from the CD cover that Lauren Harris is a rebel. She’s got like dark hair and her arms are folded and she’s got that ‘whatever’ look written across her face. And her band, they’re like totally rock: they’ve got long hair, one’s got a moustache, another one’s a bit old, and he’s wearing a leather jacket. Is that a tattoo, wow, rock…on….

Yes it really is as bad as that. All it takes is one look at Lauren Harris to realise that she’s only one step up from Avril Lavigne, and it’s not a big step up, sort of like bracing the transition from fruit pastilles to wine gums. They can present it in whatever wrapping the like, it is girl pop, no amount of guitar riffs and solos will make it otherwise.

And it’s not even very good girl pop either. Harris is the daughter of Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris, which will give you an idea of just how big, obvious and unoriginal it is. The lyrics are of a school girls standard “Love you, Get over it, I do, I know that it is you” - it took a committee of four to write that and that song still feels like it’s going to segue into Skater boy (I refuse to write it the Lavigne way) at any moment.

It’s hard to know what they’re trying to achieve. It’s clearly an album for teenage girls yet they seem to be trying to suggest that this is actually serious rooock, probably because of the Iron Maiden connection. While that’s a crowd that’s definitely comfortable with the formulaic, I can’t imagine they’re going to swallow this. No, once they pitch it to the right junior rock chic crowd, that’s when they’ll start to rake in the money. Brace yourselves, it’ll probably be huge, depressingly so…