With their second full length album, Chromeo continue their style of creating simple disco rhythms and vocoder-heavy sleazy lyrics and that’s all well and good, but I’m still left with the impression that they are trying to reach a market that is somewhat unavailable to them – girls.

Most, if not all of the lyrics are about relationships, such as the leading single’s Tenderoni’s “You and I baby we go side to side”, and Call Me Up’s “You can call me up, late at night, whenever you need to”, are aimed at girls – but I struggle to see how many girls would be actually wooed by any of these squeaky synth lines and downright cheesy lyrics. Sure, Nicky Hilton is a fan, but the aim of their entire outfit seems to be just a little too ironic, and the kind of girls like I mentioned above might just not be the type of audience that they’re striving for.

Their sound is kind of hard to describe, but if you can picture for a moment two white boys driving around in a cheap van (the kind that was popular in the 70’s with plush interior, mattress in the back and a black light and/or a strobe light for effect) cruising for chicks spouting out one liner’s like “Did it hurt? ...when you fell from heaven?” then driving off before the girls could throw things at them, well, this music would be the sound track.

Lyrically, they must derive a lot of their content from wussy-whiny RnB where singers refer to their girl cheating on them or dissin’ their homies, or not ‘being real’ or some crap. Take for instance My Girl Is Calling Me (A Liar) where, as the title aludes to, the guy’s girlfriend is giving him grief so he calls his friend to have a whinge about it. Or Momma’s Boy, where the guy can’t stop thinking about his mother enough to focus on his relationship. Seriously.

The first album was a lot better, and represented a much better attempt at chav cruise material, mainly because they seemed to be more into the characters they created, which were along the lines of low class Adidas jumpsuit gold chain combo wearing white boys with backwards baseball caps; it was just ironic enough to work because of the lyrical content. This time round, instead of appealing to that type of nerdy homeboys that ‘cruise for chicks’ they accidentally (or not) seem to be directing their energies toward wusses that don’t have enough attitude to do that sort of thing.

All that aside, the album is very good. It has a very accurate polished sound which is obviously what they were striving for, and because they seem like genuinely intelligent guys have achieved. Yet, it still seems incredibly ironic, a little too ironic to admit to listen to for anything over than its cheesy camp value.

Check out the clip for the album’s fist single Tenderoni.