The Parlotones - Eavesdropping on the Songs of Whales

Few bands have polarised SA music fans like the Parlotones have. Some have hailed them as the greatest local act since forever, while others have ironically emigrated to New Zealand to  avoid a national association with the blackshirted ones.

The reasons for the latter range from a simple distaste for their music, to the band's seemingly endless list of corporate associations – everything from KFC to Woollies stocked wines to computer sales. In their defense, they were one of the better performing acts of the FIFA World Cup opening, and their ambition may not be visionary, but it can't be faulted on a professional level.

The problem is, though, that there are little things about Parlotones music that just feel... annoying. Take the title of the album for a start: "Eavesdropping on the Songs of Whales". It's a fanciful and obtuse statement that doesn't really evoke its intended image – nor is it clearly decoded at any stage in the album... so it's hard to say what its intended image is...

Every song on the album seems to have been engineered to be an anthem sung in a stadium. So the music production is broad and sprawling and very, very well-executed. In fact, as a pure musical effort, the album is a fair success with moments of pause and bombast in good measure.

But the overwrought lyrical imagery huffs and puffs infuriatingly, "No more war / just love for one another.... follow follow follow us up to the pie in the sky / it's titanic, it's enormous... It's magic, it's magic, it's magic, magic, magic!"

So it goes for much of the album, save for the darker (and therefore much more interesting) "Inside", which discusses the final hour of life on earth ("Might as well screw just to pass the time").

There are "borrowed " lines that irk ("Wish upon a falling star / Passion patrol, accept us for who we are"), patronising romance ("You are all beautiful to me"), and quasi-religious philosophising ("We are all tiny / Like little ants we'll soon be crushed").

Morbee's dramatic delivery of these heavily-embroidered chestnuts portrays a parental demi-god talking down to his children. Ultimately positive messages they may be (benefit of the doubt here), but it suggests that Parlotones fans are a support group in need of some devotional utopian message of hope. Then again, this is a South African rock audience, so maybe that's appropriate.