27 July 1989
I’ve said it here before and I’ll say it again: in the late ’80s charts there were worse things than Stock, Aitken and Waterman records. The poster boys for that maxim are Bros, now down to the two Gosses. This called for revised branding that reduced their three-person stick-figure logo to two and, in case we missed the nuance, flipped the ‘s’ of ‘Bros’ into a ‘2’. Essentially, Bros were now ’80s Jedward, but without the charm.
They didn’t have the material either; ‘Too Much’ is a nothing of a track. (You’ll find with Bros that the gags write themselves.) Matt still has his nasally, grating voice that swallows every word before regurgitating them onto your dinner. Having 50% of your band being the drummer, up from 33.3% last time out, means Luke gets a couple of shop-window moments, notably a brief call-back to the waltz-time drop in ‘When Will I Be Famous?’, a track that now sounds like Scott Walker singing Bacharach and David compared to this. How much is ‘Too Much’? This much.
