REVIEW : Flowerhead, The People's Fuzz (Zoo/BMG)

- Martin Bate

The People's Fuzz is the second album time for this Texas band, and it's really not very good.

The first side of the album is completely average 70's influenced retro rock. You know, the type of thing that the advertising execs were calling 'grunge' a couple of years ago when, of course, it was nothing of the sort.

There's a hint of the Smashing Pumpkins in the sound but without the passion or the *songs*. The vocals are a watered down mix of Billy Corgan and Marc Bolan and the guitars shimmer and groove the way they're supposed to without ever actually grabbing your attention - it is all imagined psychedelia and pseudo-meaningful lyrics. If you're going to be this retro, then do it with the passion of the Smashing Pumpkins or the unashamed cool of Oasis, not the unimaginative smash and grab of Lenny Kravitz's last album.

"Overdrive" starts off the second side by bringing in the fuzz that the album's title suggests only to sound like a turn of the decade, vaguely alternative heavy metal band. And, it carries on in this vein to the end with "Cows" attaching a dreadful country and western verse to the rock chorus and the closing "Trip Around the World" adding to the feeling of 1990 deja-vu by adding trumpets and a wah-wah pedal and imagining itself to be funk while in posession of a lumpen rock groove.

They boast of having supported Blind Melon and Cheap Trick in the past. Given the sound of the music, this figures.