The Flashing Lights
Where The Change Is (spinART)
by Marc Hirsh
The Flashing Lights
Where The Change Is (spinART)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2002
Bands like the Flashing Lights are why I love power pop. That's not because Where The Change Is is a great album but precisely because it isn't; give me a world where this is the worst thing on the radio and I'd be a happy man. The songs are primarily reconfigurations of what you would've heard on a decent mid-'60s AM station, despite such '90s touches as the title of "Talk To The Hand." Only the pulverizing "Elevature" truly transcends pastiche; switching from stomping verses to a chorus and breakdown which sound like Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels tearing through "Jump Into The Fire," it's so mesmerizing that the band is easily within their rights when they start chanting their own name. Nothing else (not even the similarly driving and self-aggrandizing "The Flashing Lights Are On") really hits like that, but enough of the others (such as "Half The Time," in which the singer seems to go through a few too many true loves over the course of a decade) crackle in my ears for Where The Change Is to get filed as a pleasant diversion.