This is a review of "Seeds of Hopelessness" recorded by Downdime. The review was written by Chris Woolford in 2005.

This is a spiky-jangly-punky-patchy-catchy-pop and I like it. A wail of distorted guitar crashes in and we’re off at a frantic pace headlong into the new wave. It’s keyboard riffage a go-go - an electrocuted cat running up and down the keys of a casio - and it works.

The vocals are Mercury Rev on speed and they need to be. You can almost sense each band member racing each other to be the first to finish the song. The singer often keeps stopping for the guitarist to catch-up so he can belt out the chords from the intro and once he’s got there the keyboard player sprints off behind their backs so she can get home in time for Steve Lamacq.

There are bits of Bloc Party, bits of Biffy and probably bits of other bands that begin with B. It sounds a shambles but it’s not. It’s almost magic.