Starlight Mints
Drowaton
Available Now
Aspartame-free, Drowaton is 100 percent sugar bliss.
In all likelihood, if you played it concurrently with "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" - the original, not the horrid remake - its scenes would magically fall in sync with the music. Four-four time drives its mad march into the neoromantic world of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I wanted to do laudanum and absinthe while listening to this album - and I'm straightedge.
There are not a lot of woodwinds or brass horns to be heard here, but the music doesn't lack from want of instruments. Any band that incorporates tight-string arrangements into its music without sounding overly sentimental is ill, regardless of the style of music in which it plays. These mod-monsters pepper their pop ditties with violins and cellos, and they still manage to avoid making their songs sound like they are littered with sonic excess.
The Starlight Mints obviously utilized the isolation booths at Bell Labs Recording Studio with consummate skill, all the more impressive because the band engineered the album itself.
If you like this music, you might also enjoy:
Quadrophenia - Who
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Beatnik Beatch: At the Zula Pool - Jellyfish
The Soft Bulletin - Flaming Lips
Crazyfool
Train of Thought
Available Now
Like feng shui for the ears instead of for interior decoration, Crazyfool uses the minimalist reggae ethic that is defined by lots of simply played instruments orchestrally arranged in order to create a pastiche of sound as abstract and spiritual as a Navajo throw rug. On this well-produced CD, the whole is most definitely not equal to the sum of the parts.
Tempo changes from two-drop reggae to double-time ska are often abrupt in other contexts, but here, they give the music a highly danceable pulse and swell. Melancholy horn lines communicate their nonverbal sadness by underscoring the street-oriented lyrics that are straight up Nuevo MÇxico. For example, the chanting of "la llorona" on the reggae song "Carried Away" conjures up images of a Caribbean-meets-Southwest theme in which Jamaican patois is peppered by Spanish Calo slang.
The band's live shows - infamous for getting broken up by the Albuquerque Police Department when performed at private parties - are killer.
If you like this music, you might also enjoy:
Second Hand Smoke - Sublime
Question the Answers - Mighty Mighty Bosstones
Night Nurse - Gregory Isaacs
Boys Like Girls
Boys Like Girls
Available Now
When will this emo basura blow over? I guess that's like asking when 13-year-old pretty little girls will stop writing poetry about pretty little punk rock boys who keep breaking their pretty little girl hearts.
It's not that the music is poorly performed, or even that it's badly produced. It's because it is so clichÇ, it might as well be anonymous. Boys Like Girls' eponymous stinker sounds like every other alterna-emo band that has released an album any time in the past seven years. Pop-punk was marginally interesting stuff at the beginning, but it has been transformed into the piäce de rÇsistance in the heap of evidence that proves corporate record companies are just CD mills.
Please stop making this drivel available by refusing to buy any more CDs that contain even a hint of anything that sounds remotely like this band. Of course, if you prefer your music to sound like a paint-by-numbers rendering of Van Gogh's "Sunflowers," pick this up.
If you like this music, you might also enjoy:
Never Take Friendship Personal - Anberlin
Blue Skies, Broken Hearts Next 12 Exits - Ataris
A Fever You Can't Sweat Out - Panic! At the Disco
