There's This Girl

You get all your favorite hook-laden hits of the '90s on one Compact Disc -- the big, fat sing-a-long pop songs (the Warrant/Cinderella arm waver "The Wonder's Gone," the John Waite-ish "Kayla"), the stab at indie pop (Bob Mould-as-Sugar styled "Beside Myself," which steals the guitar chime from Sugar's "Changes" and turns it into a Blink 182 riff), the retro AM radio grazers ("Please" puts a new face on Dusty Springfield's "I Only Want to Be with You" and not necessarily a prettier one).

Indie music purveyors may stretch to compare them to bands like This Perfect Day or The Pooh Sticks but their '90s mainstream melodies betray them, along with Galen Keith's big-microphone, karaoke vocals that are way too pretty and bravado-filled for indie.

For all the hooks, it also has more than its share of schmaltz. Missing is the same thing missing from most radio pop music -- something akin to relevance. Lyrics like "She feels like crying / Every day" and "Can't you see that since she left me that I'm a wreck?" just don't cut it except with maybe the brain-dead MTV set or the looking-for-cooze-at-the-meatmarket set, i.e., the people who never look for relevance in anything anyway (All hail Julia Roberts). And you'd think that people would have had enough of silly love songs. FYI: The CD comes with a bonus DVD featuring two videos that I didn't watch.

back to   Posted July 14, 2003. Copyright © 2003 Tim McMahan. All rights reserved.