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This album boasts not one but two of the catchiest songs of the year, "Let's Go Parking" and "Jerk It Out", which both zap me with the Go-Go Ray every time. After hearing these 2 songs in regular rotation on KEXP, this album was a must-have for me, even though I was unsure how the rest of the album, which compiles tracks from their Swedish releases going back to 1998, could live up to the perfection of those songs.
Caesars (formerly Caesars Palace in their homeland of Sweden, now changed for obvious legal reasons) bring trashy 1960s garage pop into the 21st century. The songs are drenched in reverb, tinny distorted production, and gritty Farfisa sounds. They also have a Ramones-like penchant for simplistic, tongue-in-cheek lyrics like "I wanna smoke crack / 'cause you're never coming back" (from the opening track "Sort It Out"). They're more than just a retro-revivalist act, though, upping the ante with some really dynamite layered vocal harmonies, and adding some more modern sounds and some interesting arrangements and experimental touches, like the spacey, mantra-like "Since You've Been Gone" and the heavily tripped-out "Suzy Creamcheese", which for me is the only track to hit the skip button for, so I'll have to subtract 4 minutes from the purported 39 of bliss. That still averages out to a pretty high happiness quotient, though, and while it's true that nothing quite matched the pinnacle of "Jerk It Out" and "Let's Go Parking", this is still a dynamite listen overall. (mike.08.04)
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