You Know the Rules

Sweet verbal nerd pop. Not the greatest musicianship, but they make reference to the Booker Prize and they have an accordion. They don’t have much more than this to recommend them, but I can’t help liking them anyway. Female and high male vocals. The standard guitar drum bass thing, plus keyboards, a sweet piano, and the aforementioned accordion. Like Game Theory, but not as good.

1: Prominent accordion. Upbeat. Key changes! Chorus: “what the hell are you up to?” Like the title says, about an opulent canine: words are manipulated to fit metre, and sometimes are hard to understand.
2: Many voices. Upbeat song about a failed writer. “If the critics are so wrong / why do you have to be so tough?”
3: Vaguely retro: a tinge of surfer rock? Cute piano and bass interlude. A song for falling out of love. Rocks harder than other tracks.
4: Mellow sweet boring music. High flat vocals. Clever lyrics. Rocks out in the middle.
5: Sounds eerily like “Even You” from the Loud Family’s Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things.
6: It starts out sounding like the other tracks, but keep listening for the really cool dissonant bridges. Play this track!
7: Standard pop-rock song with nice percussive accordion and keyboard sections.
8: Ballad. Starts very sweetly with piano/guitar chords every measure. A little silence at the end.
9: Annoying female backup vocals: flat. Interlude with corny whispers.
10: Mellow intro with accordion and guitar. Boring power-ballad chorus. Odd metaphorical dialog between male and female voices (in verse-long segments) about who is selfish.
11: Sloppy lyrics about a lost cat, his criminal proclivities, and his psychological handicaps. Accordion-heavy. Bah-bah backup vocals. Song ends about 3:57. There’s a minute of silence. At 4:58 begins a reprise of Cindy Lou (track 5) in French.
-Kathryn