metasexual

joydrop

tommy boy, 1999

Mood—A little dark, a little dirty.

Sample: "If I Forget"

Thoughts— When I drove a lot I listened to the radio. Looking back, it boggles the mind that I could have endured all that incessant advertising and repetition, but I did. Every now and then, no matter what the station, someone would play something new that caught me, and I'd find a new band. I found Joydrop this way.

The radio single that I heard was "Beautiful" and that song is solely responsible for my purchase. The rest of the album is good enough, but that song is by far the best of the bunch. It has a good melody and does a nice change up from being sweet to being angry.

I'm a sucker for some quirky sounding instrumentation, which this album has in droves. Sometimes the drums have an interesting metalic reverb, like on the mellow "Strawberry Marigold", while "Dream Today" begins with an odd carnivalesque keyboard (i think) that I wish had more involvement in the rest of the song.

I could do without the rather generic and cliche track "Spiders", in which lead singer Tara Slone sings about how something feels "like spiders, spiders all over me". Yeah, okay. An edgier song about someones skin crawling, it's been done. Luckily, this is really the only song of the album that I'm just not interested in, and while lyics on other songs can veer into the realm of cliche (really, what lyrics don't?) they are much more enjoyable.

This is one of the first albums I owned that contained "explicit lyrics". That seems crazy, since it came out in 1999, but I really wasn't into foul-mouthed music, I guess! The swears are few and far between on Metasexual, so by 2008 standards it is barely noticeable.

Ultimately this is a good album, but not for everyone. It see-saws a bit, but that's the kind of thing I like.

Recommended? If you like female-lead 90s rock, yes!

Link—Joydrop on Wikipedia

Tracklist
1. Fizz
2. Beautiful
3. Breakdown
4. Strawberry Marigold
5. Spiders
6. Dream Today
7. Cocoon
8. Over + Under
9. If I Forget
10. All 2 Well
11. No One
12. Dog Star Radio
13. The Line
14. Until