Busily do they bluster and dramatically declaim, but Hope of the States have run out of anything to say and the musical ideas that might help them say it. Where The Lost Riots caught the Chichester band at that thrilling rush-of-blood, flailing-about stage, Left sees them scaling a succession of mountaintops and descending with no tablets to show for their exertions. It's amazing that they've become self-parodic in the space of just two albums. Sam Herlihy, his whining vocals turning every song into a complaint, heaps on the platitudes, slogans and workaday polemic while the band accelerate, slow down, play louder, suddenly hush, to little effect. Sing It Out and January could be by Embrace. Is that what HotS intended?
Columbia