969. The Thrills - So Much For The City (2003)

Track Listing

1. Santa Cruz (You're Not That Far)
2. Big Sur
3. Don't Steal Our Sun
4. Deckchairs And Cigarettes
5. One Horse Town
6. Old Friends, New Lovers
7. Say It Ain't So
8. Hollywood Kids
9. Just Travelling Through
10. Your Love Is Like Las Vegas
11. 'Til The Tide Creeps In/Plans

Review

Awwww, sunny fakyfornian music for the hispter masses. Much too derivative to be of any great substance this is easy to like music for those who populate their iPod with bands which start with "The".

This is not to say the album is terrible or even bad, but it is just too easy to digest. Like Chinese food it leaves you hungry for more substance a couple of hours after you eat it and it goes through you like a Shinkansen (yes I am purposefully mixing metaphors, although China is building the fastest bullet train in the world... I read somewhere).

So yeah it is all very pleasant and nice, too nice. So nice it gets annoying. So you've been to California and you make an album about it... and it is of course a heavily edited version of California, sunshine and surf. Oh well.

Track Highlights

1. Santa Cruz (You're Not That Far)
2. Big Sur
3. Don't Steal Our Sun
4. Hollywood Kids

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

In an interview, lead singer Conor Deasy explained the band's inspiration for the song material:

Those songs are our ways of picking us up because we were kind of miserable. We were dropped by our label. And the towns are put [in the songs] as a way of escapism, as opposed to documenting little tales about what happened when we went there. When we put in a title like "Santa Cruz (You're Not That Far)," it would literally pick us up a bit.

Big Sur: