Want an album you won't stop playing? Try the second LP -- imaginatively titled 2 -- of this Tim Presley-led L.A. fivesome. Put it this way: 2 totally lives up to the grand standard of the 1983 Suburbia movie song "Darker My Love" by America's Damned, L.A.'s T.S.O.L. An upgrade over their eponymous 2006 debut and two EPs, 2 benefits from better songwriting, singing, playing, production...everything. Half of it is merely excellent (like the opening two, oddly lesser songs mining the Jesus and Mary Chain and BRMC), and the other half is fantastic. Fired by some surprisingly top-notch harmonies -- this era's lost art -- riding herd over reverberating shoegaze guitars à la Creation (MBV, Slowdive, Ride), 4AD (Pale Saints, Lush), and Rough Trade (Boo Radleys), 2 is filled with dripping sugar-pop melodies and harmonic developments that usher in a neo-psych world of wonder. Start with two of the songs of the year, the wickedly catchy "Talking Words" (ridiculously buried at track ten) and the (ubiquitous on L.A. Indie 103) single "Two Ways Out." And these people know their stuff. Apart from the rare, refreshing T.S.O.L. respect, one floats, Verve to Doors to Moody Blues, on "White Composition" and "Add One to the Other One," then thrills, in classic late-'60s Pretty Things S.F. Sorrow and Parachute clipped psych style, to "Even on Your Lightest Day." And how about that gorgeous alpine orchestral rock, with strings and Mellotron, of "All the Hurry and Wait" and "Waves"? Right. We've been waiting eons for a U.K. dream pop band this good, post-Doves. Who'd have thought it'd come from the U.S.?
© Jack Rabid, The Big Takeover /TiVo