Dustin The Turkey used to crack jokes that the best thing about Mullingar was the road through it. Yet it’s a town with a strong musical heritage of Joe Dolan, and The Blizzards that continues today with bands such as The Academic.

Keen to show that the conveyor belt doesn’t stop at The Academic are Fallen Lights.

Fallen Lights are a four-piece indie rock band whose début EP is a brisk three instalments of clean, polished, indie pop rock.

The melodies are Two Door Cinema Club-esque, perky and gleaming but minus the frenetic energy that helped make the Northern Irish band a household name. The playing, singing and production are perfectly adequate and nothing is too offensive to the ear but what lets the EP down is a lack of character and excitement.

Lead single, If I Only Knew contains guitar licks that are safer than a Ministerial pension whilst the vocals of ex Voice of Ireland contestant Graham Dowling’s are simply too reminiscent of The Script’s Danny O’Donoghue.

Normally when you hear a rising guitar crescendo approaching the end of a song you expect it to pack an endorphin rush, a hit of musical satisfaction to make you stand up and say bravo, encore, but If I Only Knew fails to muster much enthusiasm or colour.

Plenty of bands fall into a bracket where what they are doing isn’t particularly original but that’s not a serious musical crime as long as the sufficient verve is injected into it to make it sound invigorating and fresh. Yet even that is lacking in ‘Fallen Lights’.

New World‘s beige chorus and plinky guitars convey all the personality of a protagonist in a Michael Bay movie when it ought to display swagger, sex appeal and bombast. When You’re Gone shows glimpses of them cutting loose and showing some individuality but seemingly afraid it might scare the grannies, Fallen Lights reign it back into more conventional mainstream radio pop fare.

There is definitely a place on mainstream radio for the type of clean cut indie pop Fallen Lights are striving for but right now they need to stamp more of their personality on their music to distinguish themselves from the legions of pretenders out there.