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MOONRAKER
by The Wes Hollywood Show
(
theweshollywoodshow.com)
Review by Mark Campos
The first Posies album is a perfect index of pop music strategies. You can name them as they happen: call-and-response verse with harmony vocs on the response – check! Kickdrum and tambourine on the last repeat of the chorus – check! Uptempo middle eight and psychedelic backward guitar solo – check check!
You could play the same game with "#1 Record" or "Drums and Wires" or "Weezer", though, which is one more cool thing about pop music. You can play the same game with "Moonraker", the second album by The Wes Hollywood Show, which partakes of the same jangly sacrament of classic pop.
Wes and his Show (standard pop config: two guitars, bass and drums) play it straight, no irony. Their "Action Sound" is powerpop, fun to hear and catchy as all get-out. Wes wears his Anglophilia on his sleeve, referencing bank holidays and Lady Penelope, dropping the H in the first song, "Oh 'ello" (which, I'm pleased to report, kicks off with a harmony "Ooh-ooh-ooh ooh"). The ballad, "Back Of A Car" (not the Big Star song) isn't maudlin or bready (or Bread-y). Toward the back there's a couple of songs – "(You're My) Chemical", "National Drug" – that cock a snoot at the being-in-a-band thing: in the first Wes relishes rocking the girls in the audience, but the second finds him barely making it through a thin gig.
Such fun music is almost critic-proof, but I have to note that one or two of the songs seem underbaked: the parts of "Louisville Slugger", for example, don't fit together as well as they might. And the production is a little thin on the surprising last song, "Man or Machine", which slides out of the verse with a harp glissando, yearning keys and kettledrum into what should be widescreen Flaming Lips-style bombast, but which seems compressed. If only they could have played the keys part on a mellotron! Still, after first hearing the song I replayed it three times, which designates it in my personal critical system as a keeper.
Moonraker clears the air of melodramatic diva-pop and other malodors with a shimmering blast of Shake Some Action.
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