With their all-black dress code, unsmiling faces and doom-laden rock, The Rasmus are a pretty scary lot. Most frightening of all, however, is the fact that they formed as 14-year-old schoolfriends in Helsinki a decade ago and had three hit albums before their 20th birthdays. Now all that hard work seems to be paying off, with their new single 'In The Shadows' topping the charts all over Europe. It's easy to see why - pounding guitars, wailing vocals and an impeccably catchy 'Uh-oh' chorus are exactly what an awful lot of disaffected teenagers are desperate to hear. And in fairness to The Rasmus, they do it an awful lot better than most. The problem is that their new album contains little more than endless variations on the same formula, with predictably diminishing returns. And after half an hour of grinding soft-rock and po-faced lyrics about suicide, even the most indulgent listener is likely to get a bit restless. Moody - but a long way short of magnificent.

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