Audio Freq grandly state in any press release/blog/myspace bio that they are influenced by Daft Punk (the title of the EP itself, Alive, is the same as the French duo’s 2007 live album) and New Order falling somewhere in between. However, their blend of dance rhythms with spiky guitar, pounding bass and soaring synth sound far less elegant than the latter, much less fun than the former, and nowhere near as innovative as either.

Lead track “I’m Alive” starts with an MGMT aping synth line that returns for a vaguely catchy chorus whilst the rest of the song finds itself in territory that was fairly well tread in the 1980’s. This then morphs into “Where You Been”, a song that sounds like The Killers, if they genuinely were killers; the dirty energy permeating through the dirty bass and synth sounds like the evil that lurks in any dark forest. It makes you wonder what they were playing at during the first track, as the fuzzy punk gives way to a hook the size of Everest, almost urging you to dance for as long as you can.

Frustratingly this energy fails to carry through to the second half of the EP with “Automatic” sounding like the Pet Shop Boys at their most trite, and the atrociously titled “Feel The Beat” reminding us why the recent 80’s revival is a very bad idea indeed.

It is abundantly clear that Audio Freq can write a robust pop chorus with catchy hooks that have you tapping your feet, but by the end of this release it will dawn that this is just another patchwork pastiche of every other hipster band that still thinks it’s novel to have a synthesizer and a guitar feature prominently on the same track.