Son of Dork - 'Welcome To Loserville' (Mercury) Released 21/11/05

It’s funny that James Bourne, the shortest, ugliest and least famous member of former pop scamps Busted should be the first to make it big(ish). Have the pop gods never heard of Darwin? Anyway, presumably fed up of playing everyone’s least favourite Busted boy, next to the more lovable Charlie (the one with the eyebrows) and Matt (the one with the drink problem), James has seen sense and seriously downgraded. Instead of stage school protégés, he’s now flanked by slack-jawed nobodies, including someone with the very un-rock n roll name of Dave Williams who looks like the weirdy albino one from Eerie Indiana.

And this is the problem with Son of Dork (SOD for short) – they’re completely anonymous. Any sense of identity they have is cribbed from other bands: the faux Americana of the album cover, the video to recent single ‘Ticket Outta Loserville’ which features cheerleaders and jocks, even the vocal delivery – everything is a desperate pastiche of American pop-punk acts. SOD even have a song called ‘Little Things’ , which is all about the, er, little things they appreciate about their girlfriends. ‘All the Small Things’, anyone? Copyist tendencies aside, the overwhelming impression as you listen to SOD churn out their plastic sub-Sum 41 nonsense, is of how dated their sound is. Lordy, even those hapless Blink boys stopped putting out this polished punk-lite drivel and went emo before they had the good grace to split.

SOD are so busy pretending to be other bands that they’ve lost touch with who they really are. It’s easy to believe that Dave Williams has spent many, many years trapped in ‘Loserville’, but it stretches credibility a bit when James ‘millionaire by the age of 20’ Bourne is blubbing about such a fate. After all, didn’t Busted provide him with his ‘Ticket Outta Loserville’? It doesn’t matter, because SOD reach the depths of their own cluelessness on ‘Murdered In The Moshpit’, in which the boys pour scorn on a “faker” girl because of her “correspondence with a popstar magazine”. Would that be a ‘popstar magazine’ like say, Smash Hits, which has relentlessly championed the band and whose cover SOD are currently gracing? You see, it’s the band themselves who are the fakers – every word, every chord, is the kind of thing that would have Mark Chapman reaching for his gun at their phony nature. Enter Loserville at your peril.