Pretty & Nice, Get Young

Here we go again. White boy falsetto vocals? Good! Extra dirty guitar riffs? Great! Drums played by a monkey on speed? Awesome! Add that together, and you have a 30-minute, 10-track, lo-fi dance-pop album that aims to please. Boston clearly loves their hometown heroes, and so should you. Get Young opens with “Piranha,” followed by “Tora Tora Tora,” and from there on in the whole thing just shouts at you to jump around. There’s so much energy in this album — outside of the forth track “Peekaboo,” which is clearly a chance for the band to take a break, grab some coffee, and recharge for the last five tracks — that it’s ridiculous.

I really wonder, however, how much I’d like Get Young had I not been listening to Fugazi and Ghostface Killah the week before. It’s a caffeinated shot to the ears and it’s kind of refreshing, but what if I had I been listening to, say, the White Stripes, Vampire Weekend, or Tokyo Police Club? Perhaps I would have been less impressed.

That’s the whole problem with this CD: as good as it might be, it gets lost in the milieu of lo-fi noise-rock with which we’ve been inundated for the past few years. So while, yes, Get Young is a good CD, and songs like “Hideaway Tokyo” make me want to get up and dance, if I were into that kind of thing, when it’s all said and done, you’re left with another good album that isn’t able to stake it’s claim at the top.