Echo & The Bunnymen is a strange choice to headline Laneway. Theirs is not a recent reunion (like Pavement or The Pixies); they’ve been active since frontman Ian McCullough returned in 1997. Their 21st century claim to fame is to have ‘The Killing Moon’ adorn the opening sequences of cult film Donnie Darko, but then, it wasn’t the director’s first choice. The Fountain is their fifth album since 1997, but just about nobody has heard
a E&TB song since the mid-1980s.

Well, here they are. Like New Order before them, E&TB have traded the ethereal guitar backdrops and chopped rhythms of old for an expansive stadium format akin to U2 or late-period Manic Street Preachers. The result is a cross between boring and awful. Mediocre melodies languish atop crashing, powerless four-to-the-floor beats. The title track reads like a disaffected revision of Bowie’s Heroes. Elsewhere McCullough stutters ‘down-duh-down-duh-down’, before asking ‘do you know who I am?’ Not anymore, we don’t. The anxious, unnerving youngster has become a shadowy old man. I’ll still be there, up front, aching to hear Silver - but The Fountain is best avoided.
– Ben

Merge Digs
01. Think I Need It Too