steering clear of the mainstream
since 2001

june 2010

review
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info opinion

Chrash

"Audio Feng Shui" CD

Future Appletree

Genre: indie rock, indie pop

March: 2007

Chrash, who I've previously reviewed, pour on more basic indie pop/rock with Audio Feng Shui and, well, that's about it really. This is a 9 song collection of pop songs, somewhere in the Teenage Fanclub, Pavement, and Shudder To Think mold. The tracks are fairly bare-bones but not overly lo-fi, with decent production values throughout. I'm finding a few of them minorly hum-worthy ("The New Immigrant Song", "Box Cars (A Long Line Of"), but hard to distinguish between and perhaps not as memorable as I might like. Though the whole disc is only nine songs long, it's hard for my mind not to wander to other things - despite the clever quips and wordplay the band tends to inject. More overt hooks would certainly improve Chrash's formula, and while I don't find anything offensive or unlikeable about this disc, I find the homogeneity and unspectacular nature somewhat stale. Still, for the grizzled pop lover, these melodic songs are a pleasant romp.

mp3s (from futureappletree.com): all roads, boxcars (a long line of)

71%

youuuuuutube!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izr2E4Tpess

Matt Shimmer

[Vitals: 9 tracks, 28:53, distributed by the label, released 2006]