Distortion-heavy poppy guitar and keyboard pop, with standard-issue confessional often falsetto male vocals. Their use of distortion is creative, fun and sometimes witty, but many songs are marred for me by repetitive structure and lame lyrics. Exceptions are tracks 4, 8, and 9. FCC’s: 1, 2(?), 7.

Track 1: Painful static over strummy guitar. FCC: "fucked it all up"
Whispery distored male voice. (4:49)
Track 2: Thickly textured distorted garage rock guitars. Catchy tune.
Standard drums. FCC?: "Fed up with all the bullshit." (3:13)
Track 3: Soft beginning with bells and male voice. Super-distorted
guitar interludes interspersed, sometimes used percussively.
Screamingly distorted guitars take things out. (3:26)
Track 4: Nearly 15 seconds of near-silence at the beginning. Mellow strummy acoustic intro. Cool bubbly/chirpy/whispery guitar sounds in background. Soft falsetto male vocals. Maintains a sweet Beatles feel, until the pounding drums and angry guitars come in at about 2:30. Continues to alternate between the two modes with a period of about 2 minutes. (7:14)
Track 5: Slow drums, soft guitars, neat distortions, somnolent vocals. (7:22)
Track 6: Begins with puking sound. Sing-song vocals (lyrical content: hot chick doesn’t like him), set against ribbons of the sort of guitar melodies that should be listened to in a ’76 Camaro and steady cymbal-heavy drums. Cute, in a way. (4:34)
Track 7: Begins darkly, with low rhythmic guitars, creeping up to distortion-heavy pop. Boring lyrics (guess why he’s disaffected) and repetitive structure. Ends with gentle chimey section with spoken intro about how someone should find a better band to join that’s not so poppy. FCC (fuckin’), but it’s near the end of this spoken word section, so if for some reason you want to play this track it’s easy to fade out. (4:13)
Track 8: Soft brushed cymbals, ambient hums, chimey keyboards, somnolent vocals about a dying child, I think. Power section near the end with a few imitation-of-Hendrix guitar licks and awake-sounding falsetto vocals. (5:32)
Track 9: Acoustic guitar strummings. Gets very loud and distorted briefly at about 1:39. I kind of like some of the lyrics (“the softest touch / known to man / is trapped inside the hardest hands”), although others (“together again / now we’re stronger than friends”) are not so great. The volume and tone variations keep things from being boring. (4:56)
Track 10: Soft, tear-jerking orchestral feel, lyrics about self-hatred. (2:59)
-Kathryn