Feed your head (Echo Park - Feeder)

Member Name: cswann

Product:	Echo Park - Feeder
Date:	16/12/02 (241 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great sounding pop songs

Disadvantages: Some dodgy songs / lyrics

"Echo Park" starts with a hint of a psychedelic sound: "Standing on the edge", the first track, manages to mix druggy, paranoid lyrics with futuristic, spacey sound affects ("love's the antidote we need"). There's also some head-banging guitars which burst in from time to time to remind us that Feeder can sound like a rock band, too.
In fact this song is typical of the entire album, which has all of these elements - psychedelia, harmonious pop, rock.

...which must be why I enjoy it so much.

The big single from the album is "Buck Rogers", which is after all the song that brought Feeder to my attention.
Buck Rogers reminds me so much of Cheap Trick - and I'm a sucker for 70s power pop, so it can't go wrong. Even the "Get a house Devon", and drinking cider lyric doesn't really break the spell for me. It reminds me that this is Britpop, but it still sounds American. Mind you, I did think, on first hearing that the lyrics were about a house in Denver. Then there's the synthesised Ike & Tina (a la Nutbush City Limits) noise, too. Great sudden end too.
Phased vocals ("A brand new car" and the "it's worth fighting for" in "Piece by Piece") in the background work really well, resurrecting a ELO sound, but somehow not sounding terribly out of date.
"Buck Rogers" also has a great sudden ending, something Feeder do very well ("Under the Weather" is another prime example).

Anyway, Feeder are, of course, not American, and they are not from Devon either They are a Welsh band - and on this album comprised Grant Nicholas (guitar and vocals), Taka Hirose (bass), and John Lee (drums). Sadly, John Lee committed suicide in January 2002.

The rock elements come in with tracks like "Seven days in the sun", like Cheap Trick and Nirvana or Wheatus - especially Nirvana, I'd say. "Turn on&quo
t; features some hig
hly Edge-like guitar, and "Choke" reminds me a lot of Blur as well as Nirvana
"Bug" is another Cheap Trick soundalike - a good tune, which I always find myself humming along to, and "Tell all your friends" has a touch of the boogie about it.
There are more gentle songs, like "Oxygen", and "Piece by piece", which could be a Dido song. It also feaures some tricksy drums/silence, rather like the guitar intro to Madonna's "Don't tell me".

At times the lyrics leave something to be desired - how about "I've got a hand inside my head, a chainsaw cutting through my bed", from "Under the weather", for a bit of schoolboy poetry? The vocals are not always exactly great, either - the track "Heads" is a prime example.

"Just a day" has a happy sounding riff; "Purple" again has a psychedelic feel, like an old (I mean really old - late 60's, Deep Purple track or something)
Bonus track is "21st century meltdown", which is like latterday U2 mixed by Moby, or something along those lines.

Overall, I like "Echo Park" a lot, mainly because I'm a Cheap Trick fan, but I know there aren?t many of us, and I can understand those who say it?s a patchy album.

My true rating would be 3 and a half stars, but any album with the song "Buck Rogers" on it should really get the benefit of the doubt, so 4 stars it is.

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