it's just always struck me as a very uncreative and overly poppy take on psych (albeit with some cow punk influences), although i spent a while around '01 trying to draw some influence from it because the singer i was working with was very much into it. it's not that it's bad, per se (the high point of the disc is the transition between the two king of carrot tracks), it's just that it dramatically pales when you try and compare it to much of anything. i mean, if it's psych it's pretty tame for 1999. if it's cow punk, it doesn't have the kind of off-kilter percussive intensity the genre needs for propulsion. if it's pop, it lack universality.

the flip side of that is that i can't tell you what kind of lyricism (i hesitate to use the word 'poetry') to like or connect with. they're really primarily a vocal-driven act, and if you don't like the vocals or otherwise place this kind of lyricism as central to your musical interests then you're probably not going to connect to the records. he could probably be doing spoken word and not lose any urgency, as far as most of his fan base is concerned.

the only way i could interpret it was either as an artsy counting crows or as an rem or pumpkins style act trying to do floyd covers and falling flat on it's face. so, i ended up sort of getting the point in terms of the ideas he was expressing and then pulling influences from other places...

....but i certainly remember giving it a really thorough listen in an attempt to try to get my head around it and simply not hearing much depth in it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jtZx9LNpAY