The Aluminum Group
" Happyness"
(Wishing Tree Records)

For this record to get any more annoying, it would have to chew holes in my socks and piddle on the carpet. If I thought it would do any good, I would hit the band with a rolled up newspaper. The misspellings in the title and lyric sheet should at least get them a grammar school rap on the knuckles.

Everything I hated about the Alan Parson's Project is here in spades. Precious self-consciousness, pretentious self-importance and the stench of intellectual masturbation ooze from every groove on the CD.

To call the sound dated would be an understatement. "Two Lights" exhumes the ghost of the hollow 80's, channeling the soulless muse of Phil Collins. "Kid" is the weakest disco inspired song that I've heard in years. Most of the rest are no better, resulting in a sickening game of "spot the influence" involving artists that one is ashamed to actually know. Nostalgia is fine, but it had better be for something worth remembering.

A desperate attempt at clever lyrics takes the place of any actual inspiration. "I've seen more drugs and alcohol than a chemistry set," sounds like the tired cliché of a lazy writer. By the time the song got around to actually saying something coherent, I had given up caring. About half the songs follow this pattern. The others start off promisingly enough, but collapse into "My name is Eskimo Bill, my name is Parachute Bob" nonsense.

Rather than simply clip the song's feathers to keep them close to home, the rotten production hacks the wings off of each beast and abandons them to die a painful death on the altar of sophisticated restraint. Just once I wanted to hear the band cut loose or at least display some emotion other than cool detachment. If they're too hip to care, why should we?

At its best ("I Blow You Kisses," "Be Killed") the album merely manages to rise to the level of pedestrian indie rock. There are a hundred other groups who toss these kinds of songs off as album filler. Pick one at random and go with it. They're almost guaranteed to be better than this.

This record may have merit beyond what I could hear, but it simply wasn't worth the effort to try and find it. Blah.

-Chris Fowler