Quicken The Heart - Maximo Park

One of the great clichés in the music industry is that of "the difficult second album", the struggle to live up to expectations second time around after a promising debut. Maxïmo Park has this struggle when coming to follow up the Mercury Music Prize nominated "A Certain Trigger". Their second album, "Our Earthly Pleasures" more than answered any questions on that score, but could "Quicken the Heart" keep the momentum going? The album certainly starts well, with the driving guitar riff to "Wraithlike" giving the song a lovely up-tempo indie-rock feel. The track in general is reminiscent of Franz Ferdinand or ...  Read the complete review

A feast of indie-fun for all you rockers out there. This is "Quicken the Heart", the third outing from Geordie-NME-favourites Maximo Park. That's probably doing them an understatement already as I doubt they want to be tarred with such a brush, but in this fickle day and age for music, that's what they've got to live with. Quicken the Heart is the third album from the five-piece, following the underground success of "A Certain Trigger" and "Our Earthly Pleasures". When I say underground success, I do of course mean they were extremely successful in their own right, but still lacked the killer punch to get Maximo Park into the ...  Read the complete review