These are hardly times for a return to old-fashioned songwriting values, and even if they were we’re already swimming in disciples. So it’s difficult to see the worth of this third solo album by the New York-based artist and sometime producer Spike Priggen, in which his lifelong quest for the perfect power-pop song continues, and largely makes about as much progress as trench warfare. There’s nothing wrong with it especially; it’s just so palpably unambitious that even the most tolerant of thrillseekers will tune out ten minutes in. Major chords = happy, minor chords = sad, and his lyrics are so wilfully predictable (‘�Every time you hurt someone / The person you really hurt is you’�, from Disappointing Everyone is one of many excruciating clichés on offer) that they seem to have occurred long before they actually plod into view. Priggen is doubtless a top bloke with a very healthy passion for Big Star (he even called his own label #1 Records). But frankly I could have written this when I was 15, so could you, and most of it sounds like it was scraped off Matthew Sweet’s cutting room floor. In 1989.
