Suppose you're bored one morning so you decide to time travel back to 1996. When you get there, you happen to run into Beck, Ween, and The Magnetic Fields. So you roofie them all (cuz you're gangsta like that). Then you drag them home and throw them into a blender (cuz you're Dahmer like that). Then you pack the resulting cocktail into the freezer, and promptly forget about it. Fast forward back to the present and you suddenly remember, "Oh snap! I forgot about my Late 90's Hipster smoothie. That would taste pretty good right about now". So you open up your freezer, dig out the ice-crusted concoction and set it out to thaw, hoping that it will still be good after all these years.
Yeah, it's still good.
Well, this is not what I expected. It's less Hipster-ish and more Lilith Fair/NPR-ish. That's not necessarily a bad thing. But if you're going to travel down that well-trodden road, it would be nice to bring something fresh to it. Baker doesn't.
Stylistically, the artist Baker most reminds me of is Patty Griffin. But to make that comparison is to reveal Baker's several shortcomings. Where Griffin's best songs offer the mature insights of a woman who's seen her share of hard knocks in life, Baker's sound like the shallow wailing of a melodramatic teenager. As a vocalist, she lacks Griffin's lung power. And where Griffin's albums offer a mix of varying moods and tempos, the relentless saminess of Baker's songs becomes tiring over the course of a full album. Baker is not without talent, and has the potential to become a relevant artist eventually. But it will probably take her a few years of growth and better self-awareness to get there.
There's nothing wrong with Kero Kero Bonito's sound and style. I can enjoy some fluffy twee-bop now and then. The problem is that the songs on this album are almost uniformly mediocre. Most of them sound like tossed-off throwaways with perfunctory melodies that immediately fade from memory once they're over.
KKB might have a great album in them eventually, but they're gonna have to step up their songwriting game considerably to get there. Until then, their undeserved hype seems to be due to little more than the Caucasian hipster's ever-growing obsession with all things Japanese.
This Album is Squaresville, Daddy-O. Imagine if you took a pre-pube Frankie Avalon, gave him a head cold, multiplied him by two, and then sicced the less-than-dynamic duo on a bunch of songs about cities (as if no one had ever thought of that tired concept before). Berry and Torrence's singing style is so nasally and whitebread it makes Mike Love sound like Howlin' Wolf. And they manage to out PatBoonify Pat Boone on stiff-as-a-surfboard desecrations of Chuck Berry, Bobby Bare, and Wilbert Harrison tunes.
Not everything these guys did was bad. They had a handful of decent singles, and Save for a Rainy Day was a mildly interesting foray into Baroque Pop. But if you even know who Jan & Dean are, then you already know the Brian Wilson-penned #1 hit that leads off this album. So you can safely give the rest of this crap a wide berth.
