Songs for the Jet Set

Album review

Another fertile row of blanched, mistreated buds of remorse finds Drugstore crafting their bleak strategies because of -- not despite -- a foreknowledge that they know their way around inspirational, well-worn transatlantic isolation sung by Brazilian-born Rosie Perez impersonators better than anybody else in Britain's post-Urban Hymns landscape. Which is a glib summary, of course, but like the nervous titters at midnight movies, the uneasiness lurking inside each and every extended moment here is powerful enough to bring down the defensive shields. Isabel Monteiro has a heartbreaking voice. An amalgamation of Mazzy Star's lonely whispers and a WTO protestor's rallying cries. And when she takes off in the quietly anthemic "Song for the Lonely" or the William Blake reinterpretation of "Perfect Day" that is "Thin Air," it's all you can do to not shut the lights off and write letters to old high-school sweethearts. Fact: Songs for the Jet Set was recorded in little over a week and its immediacy, its untouched decompression -- shorn of the sometime bluster of the past -- results in a powerful, unlawfully underappreciated accomplishment.

© Dean Carlson /TiVo