You­MeAt­Six have divided the music crit­ics with their latest offer­ing, Hold Me Down, since it came out on Janu­ary 11^th. And to be fair, I can see why. The main cri­ti­cism that has been lev­elled at the band are that the record is unori­ginal, and that there’s noth­ing on the album that hasn’t been done before (New Found Glory, Tak­ing Back Sunday, and Hoo­bastank are three names knock­ing about on the Wiki­pe­dia page). But then, in the words of Jeremy Clark­son, isn’t that like cri­ti­cising a man for look­ing too much like Brad Pitt?

I have to agree with the crit­ics, I don’t think there’s much new or excit­ing on this album. There’s noth­ing ground-breaking, and noth­ing to write home about. The album is well put together, the tracks are well writ­ten and well per­formed. The lyr­ics are well thought out. In fact, “well done” is pretty much a catch-all term to describe this album. It has no faults, noth­ing bad that I can pick out. It runs the gamut of pop-punky power rock with, for example, “Under­dog”, through to the softer, more bal­lady “Liquid Con­fid­ence”. There are guest vocals provided by The Blackout’s Sean Smith and Kids In Glass Houses’s Aled Phil­lips, both good choices, and it’s undeni­able that they add some­thing extra to the tracks they guest on.

But does it have a spark? Is there some­thing in the album that makes it spe­cial? Frankly, I can’t say that there is.

And it doesn’t mat­ter. The album is so well done that it fits in with its con­tem­por­ar­ies. It might be gen­eric, but it’s incred­ibly listen­able. If You­MeAt­Six come on, I’ll never skip the track, I’ll never change the radio sta­tion, and by the end of the song, I’ll be singing along. If You­MeAt­Six wanted to change the music scene, they failed. But if what they wanted to do was to put out a record that people can enjoy, not once, not twice, but over and over again, then they suc­ceeded. And then some.