God, all those songs about how great life is and how happy the singer is, how in love with everything they are, and yadda yadda yadda life is beautiful, even when its just boiled down to a series of common platitudes, don’t those songs really wear you down?

Or, as Matt Johnson of The The once said, contrasting radio-friendly pop with the supposedly miserable recordings of Nick Drake:

“There was an energy to that music, which is not depressing. I find the music you hear on the commercial radio stations, that is what I call depressing.”

Johnson was talking about Drake’s hippyish second album, Bryter Layter, which is admittedly in a technicolor world compared to its follow-up, Pink Moon, but lyrically it’s still not exactly a gigglefest. But in no way is it a depressing album, though. A bit like The Smiths, in fact, who I’m forever being told are miserable or depressing, a wrongness surely disproved by simply listening to a song like How Soon is Now?.

Which brings me to “Wrecking Force”. Odd title for a summer anthem, perhaps, and I’m not very clued up as to its meaning (something about making good or bad choices, not screwing up, being happy or unhappy?), but as it races along, barrels even, it sweeps me up, and there’s not a thing I can do other than just go with it. Which is more or less exactly what a great summer song should do.