Dublin five-piece Able Archer have been around the Irish music scene for the best part of ten years in one form or another. In their current guise they’ve been together since 2011 and this is their second EP. You always looks to see a band growing from release to release, and the ‘The Trouble With Strangers’  sees Able Archer embracing a plethora of styles.

Ghostmaker begins with  a “1-2-3-4” and plunges into furious guitar before the first real words uttered are “Hey”. It’s all designed to grab your attention and shake you. As an opening track it does the job of making a statement of intent and it’s impassioned tone strikes a chord.

From that point on you’d reasonably expect more high octane stuff but The Warden, with it’s xylophone plinks, is bittersweet and a much more  melodic song . With the light and dark tones of the first two tracks done it’s then a surprise to find Only Love’s stadium rock, which is full of big punchy bombast with touches of U2 to it. It has a huge sound that covers up the lack of a significant melody.

The Descent is Able Archer doing ballads. It’s a lushly produced track with piano, large swathes of strings and sincere if over earnest vocals. At the same time it lacks an emotional connection and doesn’t really stand out as particularly interesting.

Able Archer appear to try to be all things to everyone. While they may not want to be pigeonholed into being of a certain style, it makes for a confusing listen. The individual tracks veer from decent to not overly remarkable, but as a collection it comes across as disjointed with no clear style linking the songs together. The trouble with ‘The Trouble With Strangers’ is that the songs are like strangers to each other.