Helen Boulding - New Red Dress

(Maid in Sheffield)

INDIE POP GUFF

Connections aren’t everything. Sheffield singer-songwriter Boulding has worked with members of The Verve, Pink Floyd and Squeeze, Youth produced this debut album, and Bryan Adams even took the cover shot (!?). Yet still, this is bland indie-lite pop bilge of the most execrable kind – vacuous, overblown, self-important and packed full of breathy clichés and the kind of blustery pish that soundtracks car adverts shot in the Arctic tundra. ‘I don’t know what I want, but I know what I need’ rasps Helen in the endlessly turgid ‘IDKWIW’. I know what I want: I want her to shut the fuck up.