Obligatory comment about how Fightstar are way better, and Charlie needs to do more Fightstar stuff.

Nineties’ is one of the tracks which will claim a place alongside other Busted favourites such as ‘Year 3000’ and ‘Crashed The Wedding’. What happened to your band was originally performed with Son of Dork way back in 2007 and then appeared on McBusted's album in 2014. There’s something refreshing about listening to a pop band that isn’t trying to conform with what is charting well and just doing what they want. Busted very much so seem like a band who are writing what they assume people want to hear rather than. The band recorded a new version featuring Simpson and without McFly for the album, as the band believed that it fit the album's themes of nostalgia, reflection, and their hearkening back to their earlier pop-punk sound due to the lyrics dealing with James Bourne's life after Busted initially broke up in 2005.Hell, Reunion and Shipwrecked In Atlantis might as well be respective sequels to What I Go To School For and Air Hostess with the amount the draw on similar themes and settings, but while not everything is quite that on-the-nose, this album largely feels like the case of a band stunting their own growth and evolution in an effort of Simple Plan proportions to shamelessly and transparently ape their heyday. While Night Driver was an interesting sonic diversion, Half Way There gets back to doing what the band does best. We keep our fingers firmly on the pulse of the alternative music scene, whether it is covering already established alternative acts or documenting the stars of tomorrow, we are always there.

Busted have grown-up without growing old with their fourth album ‘Half Way There’ which is out now and currently sitting at Number 2 in the album charts. Today Busted release new album Half Way There and it moves away from the cooler, synth-pop feel of Night Driver and revisits the rebellious punk-pop hybrid the band explored on their first two albums. It’s quickly followed by the twice-previously recorded (by Bourne’s band Son of Dork and by McBusted for their self-titled album) ‘ What Happened To Your Band’ about the band’s split, which is given a new lease of life amidst this album of stylistic throwbacks and retro Busted vibes to become one of the album’s stand-out tracks. All image and audio content is used by permission of the copyright holders or their agents, and/or according to fair dealing as per the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.Again I find it hard to tell if I’m enjoying it, i’m sneering at it a lot but also smiling so I guess I’m enjoying myself. Nineties opens the album and it’s essentially a modernised version of the music the band was making the first-time round.

From first single and lead album track ‘ Nineties’ and all of its retro references to the album’s closing number ‘ It Happens’, which serves as a pseudo autobiography for the band and their career to date, Half Way There is very much about looking back and remembering the good old days – which is great if you’re already a fan of the band, but doesn’t lend itself well to attracting new audiences in a time when so many pop artists are experimenting with their style and developing their sound. With the talk that Charlie's been writing some Fightstar material recently, I'm hoping that next year, Busted will take a break to allow him to focus on that. Today, they also announce two extra shows on 24 th March at Newcastle’s o2 Academy and 25 th March in Southampton at O2 Guildhall. This alongside Radio serves as the highlights of the album for me, the perfect ode to a band of where they came from, who they were and who they are now. Since then, I feel they have all had success and Charlie has more than proved himself as a capable musician, gaining top 20 albums across multiple genres (Fightstar, solo-works).After all, that’s pretty much the only reason that Half Way There exists; it doesn’t push Busted forward as a band (something that Night Driver did), and it doesn’t add anything at all to the genre conversation, but as far as digging up note-perfect relics from the 2000s goes, it works like gangbusters. Only a few people I know within the music scene actually take umbrage with people asking about their old band and it being held as a point of reference for that person. Busted seem to take a lot of music that was popular with teenagers ten years ago and kinda lazily mash it together with this track.

Factor in the dated electronic embellishments of Race To Mars and the face-screwingly twee twinkles on All My Friends, and what’s already the most sanitised, marketable approximation of the genre becomes even more difficult to stomach. The album's title is a reference to a lyric in Busted's 2003 single " Year 3000": " Everybody bought our seventh album / It had outsold Michael Jackson". We carry a broad range of CDs and vinyl (7”/12” singles and LPs) and specialise in indie, alternative, rock, punk, metal plus a few other genres. As we touched on in our review of this album’s first single ‘Nineties’ back in November, Busted have never been most pop bands, even by their own admission. The chorus of this track is at the very top of the band’s catalogue and guarantees multiple repeat listens as the trio’s vocals wriggle and thrive between your ears.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.