Half Way There

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People who are commenting about fightstar, you do know Busted are better and bring in more money, right? But, not one without justification – the album begins with the anthemic Nineties that serves as a time capsule back to better times, reminiscing about everything from the Goonies to Oasis and Nirvana. In May that year, Cobus Potgieter, who had previously stood in as drummer on Busted's 2016 tour, announced that he would be the studio drummer for the upcoming fourth album.

To the album’s credit, it kept someone as cynical and bitter as me through to the end without cursing at it for being obnoxious, and that says a little bit about the talent handling this record. To give Busted their dues, there’s probably more energy and sharp guitar work than the majority of John Feldmann’s offerings in modern pop-punk (and that says a lot), but there’s such a flavourlessness to the likes of Nineties and Reunion in the way that they lift liberally from the most nebulous touchstone of pop-punk imaginable, bringing an incredibly populist approach forward but very little else. But when that one concept is what your entire album is based on, it’s hard to get much enjoyment out of it, given that the only reason it actually exists is to remind the audience of how things were. Although annoying it’s the gimmick of this song that kinda saves it, in the ‘so trite you can laugh a lot about it’ way.The band’s hugely successful debut album ‘Busted’ featured hit singles ‘What I Go To School For’, ‘Year 3000’, ‘You Said No’, ‘Sleeping With The Light On’ and ‘Crashed The Wedding’. Busted seem to take a lot of music that was popular with teenagers ten years ago and kinda lazily mash it together with this track.

Is a eulogy for the Busted of old – penned by James Bourne following on from the era-defining breakup of the three-piece, a triumph in songwriting as Bourne cuts himself open and exposes his headspace at that time for all to see. The album thankfully doesn’t take too long to get through, and ends on a high with one of its funniest and worst written songs ‘it happens’ which tells the history of busted. I think busted must have long had a level of self awareness that their music operates in this way though. It was followed up by 2003’s ‘A Present For Everyone’, which was the last record they released prior to their 2005 split.

Great artists are out there and we showcase them every day through news coverage, reviews of the latest alternative releases and interviews with both upcoming and established artists. As good as Night Driver was as an album and it showed a totally different style to Busted than we was used to, Half Way there, is truly the Busted we know and love. Though this isn’t an easy listen, Body Void’s newest journey into the abyss yields a shrieking, industrial mutation of doom-metal that couldn’t fit into the blackness around them more perfectly. As we touched on in our review of this album’s first single ‘Nineties’ back in November, Busted have never been most pop bands, even by their own admission. In that song’s chorus lyric ‘Where d’ya go, I’d be lost without you / It’s crazy, time moves slow / I ain’t seen you on the TV lately’, they all deliver the vocal with feeling and there’s a sense that in this version of the song, they’ve communicated the problems that ended their juggernaut of success so abruptly and got closure on that time to move forward to this new chapter.