Teenage Cool Kids – Foreign Lands LP (Protagonist Music)
Foreign Lands has a could-be-anyone-this-late-in-the-game feel; consummately inoffensive most of the time, nudging up to the low end of “good” in spots, and on a debt consolidation plan to repay the first run of bands from earlier in the decade that neutered the Y2K version of the Flaming Lips. Let’s go over that again with the gift of clarification: Singer sounds identical to Wayne Coyne, the song structure is rocked-up and traditional, the instrumentation standard and bereft of heavy-handed fake psych effects, the drums providing the occasional attention-getter next to the usually-forgettable, at times decent, and quite infrequently-great hooks. But you, dear listener, can fix all of the above by imagining how bad this band SHOULD be based solely on the three words they chose as a name. (http://www.teenagecoolkids.blogspot.com)
(Andrew Earles)
