Following up the
Delaware album,
Your Aquarium showcases a neat bit of reinvention on the band's part, taking
Delaware's "My Aquarium," a sweet, acoustic duet between Ackell and
Kelley, and turning it into a full-band, chugging, semi-shoegaze stomp. It's briskly catchy and good fun, the vocal tradeoffs even sassier than before and a definite all-around highlight from the quintet. The not-as-good-as-it-could-be cover of
Madonna's "Angel" reappears unchanged from
Delaware, along with a wholly new cover: "Mandy,"
Barry Manilow's notorious early hit. If anything,
Drop Nineteens improve the song, making it something of a reasonable rock effort; while kitschy, it's still fun. A band original, "Nausea," fills out the disc -- Ackell comes up with an amusingly high-pitched whine for the slow-psych zone of the track, kicking it off with the line, "It kicks the sh*t out of me." But of course. ~ Ned Raggett