Men I Trust Review

Before the band became a band, it was two producers in Quebec City making tidy electronic pop and bringing in whoever was available to sing on it. That arrangement is the whole problem. The tracks are competently built, with clean synth bass, tasteful chord changes and drum programming that never puts a foot wrong, and there is not a single moment across the record that anyone would recognise as this group.

The vocals change from song to song, so no personality accumulates, and the lyrics are the standard vocabulary of dance floor melancholy: nights, lights, someone leaving. Nothing here is offensive and nothing here is memorable. What it does show, in the guitar tones and in the way the low end is treated, is a pair of producers with genuinely good ears looking for something to point them at. They found it two records later. This is documentation for people who want to hear where a very distinctive band started out sounding like everyone else.