Smother Magazine
Cheap Girls debut full-length’s title “Find Me a Drink Home” sounds like it was some side project of Brett Michaels back in the ‘80s. But I assure you it is far removed from that cheapened hair metal. Using poetic lyrics that are far from sober but far from titty bar drunken, Cheap Girls write pop-rock melodies with sweeping power-pop anthems that are guitar-centric and fun-filled but not much else…but isn’t that enough these days?
Vast. Huge. Monumental. Paramount. These are words that engage the listener as Tearwave’s latest opus “Different Shade of Beauty” pours its soul into their ears, whispering its way through their nervous system, and into their bloodstream. Dark and sweeping guitars ala My Bloody Valentine visit churning shoegazer atmospheres and ghastly female vocals. Once you sink your teeth in deep, “Different Shade of Beauty” is a dark version of the Cranberries with better musicianship, a knack for writing horror novels, and an uncanny ability to wash ashore as a desert island disc classic. You simply need this album.
Besides their silly attempt to play dress up and look like some cast-off fifth Beatle, Coldplay’s most recent foray into the music world finds them teaming up with oddball ambient man Brian Eno as producer. Eno paints a vivid portrait of incredibly intricate pop music whose choruses soar and verses lay tender hooks alongside drenching wet melodies. There’s a lot of world-beat influences as well as off-beat keyboard work throughout this album whose title was siphoned from renowned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Is it as good as it gets for Coldplay? Probably not, but it delivers where “X+Y” faltered and this band doesn’t seem to stop impressing, even if the U2 references (iPod commercial, much?) are getting a bit tired. To summarize properly though, I leave you with:
David: “You know how I know you’re gay?”
Cal: “How?”
David: “You like Coldplay.”
While I would agree with the majority of so-called “hardcore” fans of Radiohead that this was a ploy by Capitol Records to squeeze out their last album for contractual reasons (gee, we’ve seen this happen before, haven’t we), for casual fans this is a great album to pick-up. With the hope of inducing rabid fandom, and after you listen to hits like “Creep”, “Karma Police”, “Paranoid Android”, “The National Anthem”, “Knives Out”, and “I Might Be Wrong” how couldn’t you be subject to that ear-riddled disease, I think that the “hardcore fans” should unite. After uniting like some quasi convention at the U.N., they should announce in unison, “yes we’d prefer to have the pop kiddies listening to Radiohead than spend another millisecond considering who to vote for on American Idol or which Cyrus was better, Billy Ray or his multi-millionaire underage daughter better known as Hannah Montana”. If you can’t find yourself on the right side of that argument, than you’re so ‘emo’ and ‘underground’ that even your mom will puke at your very sight and Scott Tenorman clearly must die.