This album's worth of quirky guitar pop from Fresno, California revolves around singer-songwriter-guitarist-thereminist Blake Jones. It is the band’s sixth release and features 13 new tracks.
The current lineup of Blakes’s band is John Shafer (drums), Mike Snowden (bass), Mike Scott (guitar, vocals) and Scott Hatfield (keyboard, vocals).
None of the tracks last more than four minutes and five of the thirteen are under two minutes long. The jokes are not that funny but at least they are not laboured.
You Put Theremin On My Hype Sticker is a Theremin centred instrumental which is original at least. String Lights and Hold On is an offbeat Christmas song.
There’s some stuff about analogue lifestyles including a evident nostalgia for vinyl albums (see Record Cover Girl + Used Record Stores)
Fascist Bumblebee Winter Formal is a song mocking Trump’s braindead white supremacist thugs The Proud Boys who always wore black and yellow; like bumblebees; geddit? It features a brief reference to the riff of The Who’s ‘I Can’t Explain’ for inexplicable reasons.
When I reviewed this band’s 2010 album, The Underground Garden, for W &H I appreciated the studiously non-commercial elements of what Jones and his crew were doing but added that “I don't feel remotely on the same wavelength as this band.” The same applies with this record.
