Follow-ups:

The third album will settle the following question once and for all: are Drugstore one of the most talented bands in Britain, or was their debut album merely one of the biggest flukes in the history of recorded music?? (From July 27, 2000)

I recently bought the bullet and paid $36.99 (-$24.99 using a free CD from my HMV club card) for Drugstore's newest, "Songs for the Jetset". And after listening to it ... of course, the choice is never as black and white like I overdramatised last July. The opening double-shot of "Baby Don't Hurt Yourself" and "Song For the Lonely" are as good as anything they've done, the kind of stuff that I'd call "seminal" if I didn't hate that word and couldn't describe it better as a tenderized "I Know I Could". The overproduction that marred the last album is absent, with a bare, semi-acoustic lo-fi folky mood taking it's place. Which, in a way, presents a new problem: despite solid tunes top-to-bottom, the album has a homogeneous feel with little of the noise blasts that made "Drugstore" so engaging. But looking at the set lists from their February/March UK tour, I'm salivating all over this keyboard -- PLEASE, somebody give them a North American record deal so they can tour here.

If Travis and Coldplay are to survive long-term, then they MUST quit sounding less like 1995 Radiohead and more like something, anything, else. However, advance press regarding the new Travis album do not suggest that this is the case. (January 4, 2001)

That didn't stop me from buying "The Man Who" when I woke up one morning and realised that "Driftwood" is an absolutely brilliant song. After failing to find a used copy, I finally reneged and paid for it at HMV, mere hours before the release of the next Travis album (somehow that seemed to matter at the time). And sure enough, the new album is widely purported to sound exactly like "The Man Who", except with less hummable tunes, but those opinions will surely change because it always takes a while to get into the tunes on a pop album, nobody thought TMW was a classic at the time, but a couple of million sales and humungous group singalongs at outdoor festivals have their ways of tickling the insides.

And when I saw the cover of the new Jessica Simpson album, looking out of the corner of my eye, I thought it was Britney. If Jessica wants anyone to believe that she's the anti-Britney, i.e. the chaste and tame Christian girl next door alternative to Britney's now famous Lolita image, then she might want to ditch the provocative poses and see-through tops.