The band name is pronounced 'banquet' which begs the question: Why didn't they just go ahead and call themselves Banquet?
They comprise the lead singers of five well established Indie bands from the USA and Scotland, namely Ben Bridwell (Band of Horses), Eric Pulido (Midlake), Jason Lytle (Grandaddy), Alex Kapranos (Franz Ferdinand) and Fran Healey (Travis).
John Grant (The Czars) was the only singer approached who was unavailable - he's pencilled in for Volume 2.
The man behind the supergroup project is Pulido who wanted a break from the repetitive cycle of writing, recording and touring with his band.
To avoid a clash of egos, and in true democratic fashion, each artist composed two tracks apiece with the rest of Midlake being the backing band.
Lytle and Healey travelled to Denton, Texas where the album was recorded while Bridwell and Kapranos mailed in their contributions.
It is, as you might expect, a mixed bag.
Kapranos' light-hearted Hey Banana has a certain novelty value but Healey's LA On My Mind is every bit as bland as its title.
Tara has Bridwell singing "fuck you, fuck me too" but he does so in such melodic and un-venomous style that it escapes the 'Explicit' tag on Spotify.
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Lytle's two tracks - 100 Million Miles and Failing At Feeling - are highlights but only because they sound exactly like Grandaddy tunes.
Real Love, written by Pulido, is the only song to feature all five vocalists. The George Harrison style guitar solo on this track gives succor to the band's tongue in cheek description of themselves as "the poor man's Travelling Wilburys".
Fighting The World , by Kapranos, is the closing track and ends the album in similarly classic 1970s soft rock manner.
Though invited to the stretch out into uncharted territory, the artists involved take only calculated risks. It therefore sounds like the work of a band with a cohesive goal rather than an experimental project.
This album is doubtless satisfying to the contributors but feels like a missed opportunity to do something genuinely outside the box.
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