Without hearing a note of their second album, you might already detect a new sense of purpose about the Vaccines. For one thing, there's the title. Their debut album slunk into the shops under the name What Did You Expect From the Vaccines?, an apologetic shrug amid a storm of hype. Here, instead, is a cocksure statement of confidence and maturity. For another, there's the way they look now. Gone are their nondescript, preppy clothes, replaced by lank, centre-parted hair, skintight jeans and the kind of denim cut-off known to metal fans as a battle jacket. It's all presumably intended to communicate the same message expressed by vocalist Justin Young in a recent interview: "We don't want to be an indie band any more, we want to be a rock band."
There's something charmingly gauche and gung-ho about signalling your new rock direction by dressing up like the front row of the Swindon Leisure Centre the night Saxon's Strong Arm of the Law Tour '80 hit town; it's like indicating your new album has a reggae influence by insisting every member wear those fancy dress shop rasta hats with the fake dreadlocks attached. Still, the Vaccines' new assurance and vaulting ambition seems a little hard to square with Come of Age's two singles, both of which find Young agonising over his own shortcomings as a rock star. On the peppy Teenage Icon, he proclaims himself "ordinary … average … out of shape with messy hair … not magnetic". Opener No Hope, meanwhile, buffs up the trebly sound found on their debut until it sounds suitably epic, while Young impersonates the poisonous, bug-eyed sneer Bob Dylan patented in the mid-60s: "The whole thing feels like an exercise in trying to be someone I would rather not be." This is a funny thing to sing while you're audibly doing an impression of another artist. Maybe it's a clever metatextual joke, or maybe Young just hasn't really thought it through; either way, you get the point about his discomfort as a frontman.
It goes without saying that an awareness of your own shortcomings and a sense of unease are not characteristics befitting a would-be rock god: it seems highly unlikely there were waves of self-doubt emanating from vocalist "Biff" Byford the night Saxon's Strong Arm of the Law Tour '80 hit Swindon Leisure Centre. Nevertheless, it's discomfort rather than confidence that runs through Come of Age, a noticeably more tentative record than the Vaccines are talking it up to be. The sense of a band with ambitions to be something other than what they currently are is strong, but so is the sense that they haven't really worked out what it is they want to be.
Aside from the Dylan impersonation, there are tracks on which the Vaccines do that thing indie bands aiming for greater heaviness always do and write boring songs with riffs but no tunes: maintaining a certain standard, the Vaccines' boring songs with riffs but no tunes are every bit as boring as the Arctic Monkeys' boring songs with riffs but no tunes. More successful are Aftershave Ocean's stab at a Teenage Fanclub jangle, and All in Vain's attempt at classic 60s pop, complete with George Harrison-inspired slide guitar.
Amid all the trying-on of other people's styles, the most successful tracks are the ones that stick to what the Vaccines did on their debut, albeit in a slightly more opaque way. With lyrics in which Young imagines himself "bewitching and enthralling all the boys", I Wish I Was a Girl attempts to conjure up an atmosphere of louche sexual ambiguity. On that level, it's a failure – it feels about as louche and sexually ambiguous as Gertcha by Chas and Dave – but musically it's terrific: winding, crepuscular, decorated with spikes of Pixies-esque guitar. The dolorous twang of Weirdo is beautifully controlled, threatening to burst into something more direct, but never quite doing it. The closing Lonely World balances its anthemic ambitions against an off-kilter, trudging beat, a weird combination that somehow works.
Come of Age isn't a bad album, but nor is it the swaggering bid for world domination it's made out to be: it's too confused and incoherent. But if it isn't going to propel them skywards, there's enough decent songs on it to keep the Vaccines ticking over in their current position. Given that their current position is as virtually the only new British alt-rock band to sell any albums, that's hardly a disaster, even if it's clearly not what the Vaccines had in mind. But as someone listening to Justin Young agonizing about his inadequacies might gently suggest: sometimes you have to be content with what you are.
