The mark of Steve Albini isn’t necessarily a stamp of quality, but the name Stuffy (or indeed The Fuses I guess) most certainly is. Like the Chicago producer, there’s not much new under the sun in the way of either music or production, but if you have a raw unpolished pop tune it’d be hard to spoil it. And the ‘Ahhh Song’ – despite a rather blatant piece of trickery in having a chorus consisting of, yes, “ahh”s – take a Urusei Yatsura blueprint for the verse, shove some swirly keyboard on it, and slap that chorus in there, and if my cat had recorded it in a toilet on a dictaophone, it’d still be a classic 3-minute indiepop single.
