Discosadness

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Between Say Hi to Your Mom and Dogs Die in Hot Cars, 2004 is likely to go down in rock history as The Year We Officially Ran Out Of Good Band Names. A one-man-band from New York (his own mom knows him as Eric Elbogen), Say Hi to Your Mom specialize in the sort of bare-bones D.I.Y. indie pop with little middle ground: many will love the bedroom-four-track intimacy of this album and revel in the low-intensity, medium-fi performances and lyrics that manage to sound intensely personal and completely opaque at the same time. Others will tell Elbogen to come back when he's got a drummer who doesn't sound like he's scared of waking up the people in the next apartment, and a musical palette that keeps the songs from sounding quite so much alike as they do here. Their loss, because once you look past the small deficiencies in recording and arrangement (not that hard to do), Discosadness has a lot of catchy tunes with interesting, oddball lyrics. Although not all the songs are as immediately appealing as the opening "The Fritz," which owes a little to Beck, close listening reveals the album's charms. Fans of Dump, East River Pipe, or pretty much any self-released indie EP that came out between 1994 and 1997 will find a lot to like here.

© Stewart Mason /TiVo