I remember a year or two ago watching a video review of a new game that I’d been enjoying, and thinking to myself that I had a very different experience to the one the reviewer had. Their time with it had left them tired and bored. “Urgh, not another open world game with crafting and collectibles”. Gameplay familiar to half a dozen other games they’d reviewed that month, and the month before that, and so on, as they went on to explain. As someone who buys maybe three new games a year, and likely only one of those fitting the mould they described, that criticism felt irrelevant to me. Many of the things they found frustrating were the parts I felt drawn to in the first place. Their point of view as someone who sits and plays every day for a living, conscious of deadlines and the next game on the to-do list, felt completely disconnected from me playing to unwind for a hour or two in the evening. Both perspectives were equally valid, but I was struck by how far removed they were from each other.

Though I may only play a handful of games, I listen to a lot of albums; only a small fraction of which wind up on the site with a full write-up. Through this lens, I’ve grown to better understand and relate to that game journalist’s plight. Especially these past couple of years. It seems every few months an album gets hyped up as the hot new thing, and I press play only to find much the same record I’ve heard dozens of times before. Another indie band making a Post Punk record. Slacker rock with – get this – a bit of a country twang. Strong crisp vocals are overrated, we need something more real. Something deep, dour and disinterested, or a light offkey warble perhaps? It’s Geese, or Wednesday, or Big Thief, one of the Windmill scene bands, take your pick.

My usual response is to move on, and focus my time and energy on something I found more interesting, but more and more of the indie sphere seems to getting sucked into this homogenous singularity. It’s half of my inbox, all over my New Music Friday playlist each week, the multitude of my recommendations on Bandcamp. I’m just so bored of it. Don’t get me wrong, there are records I love in this vein. Records where the band have managed to differentiate themselves and put their own stamp on the sound, like Ratboys‘ new album earlier this year, or Divorce‘s debut last year. They seem to be the exception to the rule though, for the most part they’ve all begun to blend together.

Through no fault of their own, Manchester outfit Westside Cowboy ended up being the straw that broke the camel’s back with their debut album It Goes On. It’s by no means a bad record. The drumming is excellent, and I appreciated the contrasting vocals. There’s a great energy to tracks like ‘Kick Stones (The Boy)’, the driving bass and chaotic breakdown of ‘Paperchains’, and the buoyant swells of ‘Well Done Kid, You Did It’. ‘Coyote’ and ‘Patchwork’ have their pretty moments, and the band have a great knack for making songs that build towards an interesting climax. Yet I’ve just… heard it all before. All that’s missing is some fuzzy MJ Lenderman style guitar and some lap steel and It Goes On would get a full house in 2020’s Indie Bingo. This debut is only the start of their journey, so there’s every chance they’ll claw their way out of the slacker rock event horizon on future releases, but there’s nothing unique drawing me to this one. My perspective as a reviewer may be very different from the average listener – if you only check out a few new albums in a year, this is a fine pick, and you will find plenty here to enjoy – but I can’t help but be left wanting more.