The situation of Boca/River is mental and it should be suspended and Boca get out of the copa libertadores. Fucking shame

i foookin hate football
fuckin hate football hooligans
fuckin love football hooligan movies
adam west is a class batman
i love ian browns solo lps but stongly believe he sold his soul when the stone roses reformed so i never bought into the whole reunion malarky it was for money and nowt else
wayne rooney is a c_unt

Horse racing without Jean Michel Bazire, it is no longer horseracing for me ...that said, I wonder how death feels JMB survived his stroke and collapse? Two near death accidents, two survivals. God's probably nervous of the small Le Mans born wonder now.

Poor Daffy Duck:

Catfish & The Bottlemen: Alternative britrock fodder, time warped from 10 years in the past, cashing in on indie kids. The NME crowd. Style over substance, a try hard frontman and no songs to justify their massive audience. Oh, and the name's shit too. Sounds like a Mumford & Sons cover band. Horrible. 

I agree. No one will give a shit about them in five years time

Or the way I see it, a long overdue band with a refreshing attitude that know what they're good at which gives us an album of no filler - just well written, tight, catchy songs that have earned a loyal fanbase that only seems to be growing. 

I went to see them not long ago, and was surprised to learn that another 10 people I knew were also in attendance. Clearly they've captured the attention of young people but bands exist to gain fans and give them music and travel to their towns to play it - it's cynical to call that a cash-in. They're exploiting nobody and ripping nobody off, they're just doing what a band does.

There's none of this NME "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" business - NME gave them 4/10 and would have been quite happy to forget about them, but the band have proved them wrong with their rising popularity being all of their own doing.

Desperate to put a tag on them, I've seen a few meritless publications describing Van as "gobby" when he comes across in every interview as an honest young man who genuinely enjoys being in a band that he's clearly devoted a lot of his life to. I've walked past their unassuming guitarist a couple of times in the street and thought "You really are just a normal guy, aren't you" - there's no false pretences.

You use "try-hard" in a negative manner but what's wrong with a band trying hard? I have a lot of respect for them for making such progress out of the work they've put in, and I'd rather invest my time and money in a band that "tries hard" than a band that doesn't give a shit.

Repent all people who don't know about good use of apostrophes:

...Just a day or two, until everyone stop talking about him.

To describe the band as long overdue would be to describe the first guitar band in what seems like ages that has such a strong connection with the newest generation of music lovers. 

What was the last guitar band that both lyrically and musically grabbed young people by their collective ears? 
Sure, there's indie bands like The Vaccines and such but bands like this haven't got any songs that resonate with young people like Catfish seem to have.
I've seen countless tweets along the lines of "Listening to Van McCann just makes me want to quit all this and be in a band". 
Now to me, that's the complete opposite of uninspiring.

Writing songs they know their fans will like could be called playing it safe, but we all joined this place for a band called Oasis who, despite recording with leftfield producers on outside-the-box projects, continued to churn out safe, tame albums right up until 2009.
I don't see why songs people like to sing to should always be cynically dismissed as sugar-coated pop. Why can't a guitar band write melodically strong songs that are structured for people to want to sing along to? That's hardly unheard of.

Yes, some girls might be attracted to Van McCann but to use that as a criticism of the band is ridiculous. When girls fancy bands frontmen, as they have done for several decades, does that automatically render their music meritless?

I'm not saying they're the best band in the UK. For such a newly emerged band it's a preposterous statement. But one thing they do have under their belt is an album of solid songs, an eager fanbase and a huge amount of potential for their next album to take them so much further. 

This forum had threads after the debut of Arctic Monkeys basically saying they weren't that good and would influence nobody.
And even if nobody of musical worth cites Catfish as an influence, if they encourage people to pick up a guitar or convince people that guitar music is the way forward, that's a good job done.

Now before the album they had quite a cult fanbase but crucially a lot of the songs on it had been out quite a while.
The album just allowed them a further reach of exposure and it attracted the same young people who liked them before, only now there's a lot more of them.

The large audiences thing may have some truth to it, but I'd argue that there'd be dips in the quality of output of any band regardless of size.

Let's not get carried away, the Katy Perry/Nickelback thing proves the large audience point but Catfish are still, to some extent, quite a cult band that haven't quite reached the mainstream of indie music. Talking size, they shouldn't be mentioned in the same breath.
A lot of people still haven't a clue who they are, so their fanbase isn't really "unjustifiably large" - they have a relatively small but no less devoted following.

I used the term "cult" because before their album was released, they very much were.

Even now, getting on for a year since it was released, they're still not a huge band by any means. Right now I probably shouldn't call them a cult but there's certainly a vast majority of people who aren't aware of their existence.
I can kind of draw parallels with the Courteeners at the moment, in that both bands do sell a good amount of tickets but neither have really got a foothold in the mainstream of guitar music, let alone the music scene as a whole.

You speak of the bands slogging it up and down the country endlessly but Catfish and The Bottlemen are not far removed from this scene at all. It's what they've been doing for years, graduating each year from pubs to small live venues and only most recently to Academy venues.
Even at this level of venue, 99% of the people to whom I mentioned my attendance at the gig didn't have a clue who the band were.

I also disagree that a singable chorus and a good melody plays into the hands of "easy-listening" or being "too friendly". Again, it sounds as though you're using a big chorus as a detractor, but there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. 

Despite Noel remarking recently about the volume of teenage girls at his show, nobody questioned his musical integrity or accused him of bubblegum-pop childrens tunes when he released an album full of choruses and singable tracks.

Going back to Arctic Monkeys, they've gained a lot of female fans recently, and people use that to spite them when they release a successful album that isn't to their tastes, saying they're pandering to the fangirls when, without these fans, people would likely have praised the change in direction and expressed how they deserve more recognition.

People are too quick to dismiss a young band as pandering to their female fans with catchy music about relationships, it's too easy a criticism to make when they'd be making the same music regardless.