When you Google ?Sophe Lux?, top of the page you get a link to their website and a snippet of presumably lifted text. You get this: Sophe Lux is a moody rock band centred on one very talented woman. That woman is Wendy Haynes. A highly original songwriter in the vein of PJ Harvey and? and there it stops, because even Google has had enough already. OK, let?s say we?re intrigued by this biographical sliver. Say we think to ourselves: ooh, I like moody bands! And talented, eh? Sounds like my cup of tea! We click thru to the site to be presented with a highly stylized photograph of, I don?t know, could this be Wendy perhaps? (Her colleagues appear beneath her.) And you know what? They have a song called ?God Doesn?t Take American Express?; and not only that, but it sounds like 4 Non Blondes only even more fuckwitted. Can you imagine? Just before I put this review out of its misery already, you know what the bottom-line worst thing about all of this is? Worse than the wacky, novelty-tie yes, God, now this is proper entertainment since we dress up (no jeans and t-shirts! Wendy has banned them!) like 18th century French courtiers (guess who?s Marie Antoinette?) and play try-hard ?quirky? flat-lining cabaret indie-rock slop with Wendy trying to be both Kate Bush and Alanis Morissette both at the same time? That Wendy Haynes is undoubtedly going to repay me somehow for this review. Because she?s clearly so, shall we say driven (thus frankly dangerous), she makes Courtney Love look like Barney the fucking Dinosaur (you should read this press release; I mean fucking hell. I?m seriously tempted to just quote all of it; it?s that exquisitely deluded). So you know what I?m going to do in a brave attempt to offset Wendy?s inevitable rage? I?m going to give her (and her fancy dress-shopping gimps) ten out of ten in the hope that she?ll just let me off with the telling-off her muse deserves, but the only score her ego could ever permit. The album cover is good though. And you know what? They?re probably actually really nice people. Hell, maybe this entire review is a just one whole weird, twisted joke (like Wendy?s lyrics which, by the way, are inspired by the philosophies of both Nietzsche and Lou Salome, the explorations of the ancient alchemists, the dreamy surrealists [I?m not making this up by the way ? could she be talking about ?God Doesn?t Take American Express? here?] and the spiritual poetry of William Blake) and it?s actually my album of the year? Is this post-modernism yet? Did I mention Wendy enough? 10/10 -- Seb Hunter (3 April, 2007)