I think I'm gonna have to ask PhiLL to stop sending me albums of jangly guitar pop (and let it be said that I'm the one who asks for them), because I obviously don't like it anymore. I used to. A lot. What's happened? Did I grow up? Evidence suggests not. But still—I don't seem to want to listen to this. And let me make this clear: it's my fault.

Jedediah Smith writes catchy pop songs. His band plays well. But I feel like putting this whole album into quotation marks, because it all sounds so well-trodden. The first song could fit onto a Go-Betweens album. The fourth is a mercifully short cod-Smiths or certain-era-REM tune. Things proceed in a fashion that almost always suggests one or all three of these influences. None of these songs are bad. In fact, they're all pretty good. But none of them are the product of a guy working in any original way whatsoever, even if he is really good at writing songs. "Heartless and Cruel", for example, is a Smiths song without the lyrical genius that makes Morrissey great. "Ruin" more or less steals the drumbeat from "Just Like Honey", which the Jesus and Mary Chain more or less stole from "Be My Baby" in the first place. But the Jesus and Mary Chain made it into something new, and something terrific. My Teenage Stride make it into Reid brothers lite, the musical equivalent of drinking Budweiser from Saint Louis when you really want Budweiser from the Czech Republic. Here's a pretentious literary allusion: this album is like Otto Pivner's play in The Recognitions. Lyrically and musically well-trodden territory doesn't need to be retrod (retreaded?), does it? Does it? Does it?

In 2007 I can't think of a particular reason to listen to something that sounds like it came out of the 80s and 90s with no advance on the ante. Elsewhere on this site I've written about 1986, who I praised for sounding like they came out of a particular long-since-gone scene. The difference is that they made it new, and made it their own, and had some balls, whereas this guy just seems to be working through a comfortable formula that won't offend, and will almost please almost anybody, without giving us the kind of sublime heart attack that the Smiths did, and that REM did when they put their minds to it.

All of this is a whiny and long-winded way of saying that if you're of a certain persuasion, you'll probably hum along to this album for a little under forty minutes, but you'll probably spend a lot of those hummy minutes thinking about REM's early days, and ultimately it's just going to make you go back and listen to the Smiths for the first time in a while which is really a better way to spend forty minutes.

So wait, I take it all back. It's not my fault, at least not entirely.