Tuesday, December 17, 2002

There was finally a bright spot on commercial radio with "What's Golden" by Jurassic 5. I haven't heard it on the air recently. I can only guess that the marketing people are idiots or that the suits in radio pulled it from playlists because they stopped getting paid to play it. The song, with its Frankenstein synth bass line is so damn infectious.

The rest of the album on which it appears, Power in Numbers, has a lot going for it, too. The lyrics are densely syllabic -- find me another CD with "epicenter" and "epidermis."  The group has both the rhymes and the rhythms.  "Thin Line" gets a great melodic counterpoint from guest Nelly Furtado's cascading vocals.  But there are downsides.  Some 1990-sounding sound collages bloat an otherwise tight production.  And after four listens I still can't quite figure out if "One of Them" is homophobic or decrying homophobia; until I figure it out, I'll be troubled and hope it's the latter.

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