Ladies and Gentlemen
We Are Floating In Space

by Count Bruga

What a great title. What great cover art. I couldn't wait to be floating in space with them.

What a totally boring album.

The single I Think I'm In Love is cool, with that duck-call harmonica thing going on, kind of a droning, World Party type of vibe...and the first song, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space is pretty cool; it sounds sort of like Belle & Sebastian.

But when someone calls their album Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space and makes the cover look like prescribed sedatives, I want 70 minutes (or, at least, 45) of floating in fucking space.

The only tune that really lives up (or down) to the name is Cop Shoot Cop. For the first few minutes, anyway. It's real low down and groovy, appropriate to the theme (which is not about street violence, by the way...it's about heroin, get it?). But again, just as you're getting all settled in, it explodes into aural abuse. Fucks up my whole trip.

And almost everything else sounds equally bombastic, nonstop droning indulgent excess. Like Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Like a heavy metal ending that never ends. Like the wrong end of Oasis. And when they're not doing that, they're dicking around with cellos and so forth in some vaguely Beatlesesque manner, which isn't exactly my bag either.

I made a tape of Ladies and Gentlemen to listen to in the truck, but I didn't label it, 'cause I had a feeling I would soon be taping over it. That feeling is reaching a crescendo now. I think I'll start a tape with the CD's I've picked up that have one good song and the rest is shit. It'll have Smashmouth's now totally assimilated Walking On The Sun as a time capsule piece, Mulu's Pussycat, and Spiritualized's Love, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Cop Shoot Cop, and, if I'm lucky, nothing else. Then I'll go down to Lou's records and trade them in for something else. Like El Chicano. Or maybe even Pink Floyd. It's nothing new, but at least when they say their gonna float in space, they mean it.

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