Album Review: Portugal. The Man - Evil Friends

Evil Friends is Portugal. The Man's seventh studio album in eight years and the first in that time to be in gestation longer than 12 months. So what's been keeping them busy in the two years since In The Mountain In The Cloud? For a start, they were lining up Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, to produce Evil Friends, and as such it's unsurprising to find the music within is a far cry from the whacked out throwback rock of In The Mountain.

It is a pop record plain and simple – the bombast of Waves and closer Smile excluded, both serving as a bridge between the two most recent records – and achieves the goal of one such record: hits. Sea Of Air is a charming Beatles-esque number; Holy Roller (Hallelujah) is like some contagious ungodly collaboration between Oasis and Jason Mraz complete with brass; Modern Jesus is made for drugged-up neo hippies, a dangerously-catchy chorus naffly proclaiming, “Don't pray for us, we don't need no modern Jesus to roll with us/The only rule we need is never givin' up”, and sounding primed for painfully out-of-key falsetto festival singalongs.

Trying to decipher how much of the latest sound of Portugal. The Man can be attributed to Burton in his role as producer and how much to a band prone to exploration and recently reconfiguration is limited to the realms of speculation, but the results speak for themselves – this incarnation of the band is a mix of middle-of-the-road indie (Purple Yellow Red And Blue sounding like a Jamiroquai B-side) and unforgettable pop gems.