Schatzi
50 Reasons To Explode (Mammoth)
Death Of The Alphabet EP (Mammoth)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in Space City Rock, Winter 2005

For the past few weeks, I have been staring somewhat blankly at the two Schatzi CDs sitting on my desk, waiting for some sort of inspiration to strike. The problem isn’t that 50 Reasons To Explode or the Death Of The Alphabet EP (built around four Reasons tracks) are so bad that I can’t think of anything to say about them – hell, terrible albums are marvelously easy to write about – but that they’re just so generically, listenably blah that it’s hard to muster up much enthusiasm. They showcase your typical post-Weezer punk-pop band with melodic, forgettable vocals singing melodic, forgettable melodies (I note here that the voice that seems to stick out the most is Anniversary keyboardist Adrienne Verhoeven’s backups for “Death Of The Alphabet”). The boys in Schatzi are intent on portraying themselves as wacky, and so they end both Reasons and Alphabet with the same unlisted remix of “Death Of The Alphabet,” which think they intend as a joke, but I’m not sure; I can’t imagine that they’d want it played on the radio, usually the primary reason for such a stunt, since the song is mixed in a cut-and-paste manner so patently foreign to anything else on the discs that it would completely misrepresent the band to unsuspecting listeners. And if it is a joke, then it’s just not that funny, certainly not enough to merit placement on two different releases. The rest of both discs is basically background emo, something that’ll pass the time without you clawing at your ears. So, really, Schatzi could go either way at this point. Somebody call me when they get there.

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