The independent album
being our generation's open-mic night, often things don't go as
swimmingly as one might hope. For evidence, look no further than
Lose Our Heads, whose medley of ragged, acoustic guitar strums,
painful and incoherent vocals, and outright abominable songwriting
makes for twelve tracks of abject cruelty directed squarely at the
listener. Smile Case's lone, tone-deaf member, Ben Andress,
seems to have put a very negligible amount of care and effort into
these utterly indefensible lo-fi nuggets, producing such lowlights
as hideously blathering "In Some Other City" and disorientingly
dreadful "Life of a Party." Lou Barlow would be severely
unimpressed. In fact, the only bearable moments on here are the
brief sound clips nabbed from Hollywood fare - Swingers,
Chasing Amy, Girl Interrupted... but you know you're in
trouble when only thirty seconds of your thirty minute album are
actually listenable, and those happen to be the only thirty seconds
you aren't actually responsible for.
