Pitchfork

No one needs The Vines. No one cries over Vines songs, or includes them on breakup mixes. They're vague, inoffensive noise, a band attractive to sheltered teens who find Hot Topic punk and nu-metal goth overbearing. Don't get me wrong: It's a shame you can't go straight from N*SYNC to The Jesus Lizard, but that's just the way it is. You need Nirvana. And when you're playing by MTV's rules, you can't get to Nirvana until you see a cute, awkward gurner from Hurstville talking about them in brutally staged interviews.

"I first heard Nirvana when I was around 14. I knew it was not the Spice Girls. It was serious. They're like The Beatles-- all their albums are great." --Craig Nicholls, 2004

Nirvana are to The Beatles as The Breakfast Club is to Citizen Kane. Like you, I prefer The Breakfast Club, but I'm not dumb enough to think it's a tenable position. This should tell you a lot about The Vines. Basically, The Vines are Dig. Everyone remembers Dig, right? "Believe"? Defenders of the Universe? I can see by your face, no.

The Vines play to the sort of timelessness offered in sappy teen heartache movies, but lack the requisite desperation and depth of character. Their stories are recycled, and totally bereft of personality; an isolated suburban youth, Nicholls posits daydreams built on other people's fantasies, which is why he's never conveyed more than facsimile conviction. He is Australia's Jesse Camp. Everyone remembers Jesse Camp, right? Man, I am striking out here...

After unloading "Get Free II" ("Ride") as its lead-in, Winning Days resorts to "La la la la la" choruses and cloaks The Vines' bland grunge licks with out-of-step effects pedals, veering wildly from their established three-chord sound to co-opt the ascendant psych of The Flaming Lips and Polyphonic Spree ("TV Pro", "Autumn Shades II"). You could argue they're pushing the potential of their debut's Beatles knockoffs, but that redoubtable praise only applies to "Amnesia" and "Rainfall", two scoops of classic rock vanilla ice-cream that, given a sunny day, are slick and sweet down the hatch. In all other cases, the flanges and dot-dash changes play like a pathetic reach for relevance, much like the album cover, a Rolling Stone editorial cartoon mockup of Aladdin Sane.

There's mild promise in the title track, which reveals exposure to more local influences (The Church, and especially The Chills), but Nicholls' forced Richard Butler impression is exhausting. The wincing Beatles tribute that follows-- "She's Got Something to Say"-- finds him mining the same territory as Highly Evolved, but with fame comes the shameless confidence to dive even further into the Fab Four's melodic closet. On "She's Got Something to Say" and "Sun Child", the band are functionally listening to old records, then running back to the studio to cop their best moves.

But these are only stylistic complaints: The Vines earn real damnation as Winning Days comes to a close. However boring and harmlessly vapid the first ten tracks are, "F.T.W." obliterates any possibility of forgiving them. What kind of munted bogan could record a song called "Fuck the World" after having toured it? If we were back at The Vines' first show, at a lawn bowling match, I could appreciate the pre-teen angst in busting out a song like this. But after making girls cry from sea to shining sea, this kind of cynical outburst is too transparent, too much of a childish tantrum. If Nirvana couldn't turn heads with "Tourette's", what could The Vines possibly accomplish adding a thin layer of ecoterror and 1984 one-liners? Get Real. By a mile, "Fuck the World" is the worst thing The Vines have done, ending the already wanting Winning Days in disastrous, incongruous fashion.