with its boss guitar break, to "Out in Style," with its intimations of existential failure, track after track starts with or launches into a zooming tunelet recognizable at fifty paces. And how the music does zoom -- as with Oasis, Morris broadens Serge Bielanko's guitar till it fuzzes over like a Hammond B-3, and when the band immigrated to the U.K. last year, Dave Bielanko left his banjo behind. But missing from this candid and even intelligent attempt to take a local band pop is -- what else? -- any vestige of the local. Avowedly "personal" lyrics are shamefully short on wit, detail, psychological insight -- or sex, which might have been enough. Maybe next time Bielanko should try Maxwell impressions.

ROBERT CHRISTGAU
(RS 899/900 - July 4, 2002)