| · It’s about time.
The Rainbow Quartz record label claims they are "your source for perfect guitar pop," but lately they haven’t been living up to their motto. The last eight months have seen a parade of dismally average releases from Rainbow Quartz with bands mining the already barren landscape of British-invasion and straight-up rock. With equally lackluster album art, the label certainly presents a unified front, but their roster has been mostly forgettable (with the exception of The Asteroid No. 4 and The High Dials).
Sadly, The Lackloves (Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s answer to low-energy retro rock) don’t do much to turn things around. With crowded lyrical passages and production that doesn’t live up to the promise of their simple song structures, the soaring guitar solos make the album too busy to be compact, but the rest of the album is too sparse to really get things going. The Beat and the Time isn’t a bad album, but if you look back at artists like The Feelies or Matthew Sweet you can see both ends of the same rock spectrum with more power and sincerity.
While Lackloves suffer from their mid-fi presentation, The Contrast successfully revel in theirs. Like an amped-up version of the Byrds (as so many bands are), The Contrast are a crisp, bright and tight-as-hell package. The lyrics are smart and smarmy (as are song titles such as "Functional Punk Pop Song") and the whole album is thoughtfully delivered with almost nothing wasted. With a recently settled four-piece lineup, the band makes the most of their dual-guitar stage plot and solid vocal harmonies. More importantly they can slow it down without completely derailing the album (unlike so many artists on Rainbow Quartz). David Reid’s earnest vocals meld perfectly with bubbling lead guitar lines delivering what Rainbow Quartz has been promising all along – perfect guitar pop
LACKLOVES 3/5
CONTRAST 4/5
JASON LEWIS
|
Copyright ©2004 FFWD. All rights reserved.