Reviewed by Eric Saeger
Every six months or so some foreigner finds my eclectic, willy-nilly output and assumes I’d be super-psyched to receive a big-ass stack of random LPs from their country. Poland, Belarus, Singapore, whatever – they’re always big stacks, CD-case-inserts written in foreign languages all crimped into thin plastic sleeves to save on postage, like a crash-course in the mediocre music of the sender’s country. If I’ve learned anything out of it, it’s that almost no band based in a non-English-speaking country can compete with your basic everyday US/UK/Canada band, but there are exceptions, for instance Forty Winks, an Italian indie-rock band whose name is not, despite what you’re thinking, ironic. The effort here is patchwork-ish, one minute psychedelic skronk (‘Beneath her Feet’), the next a musical mash-note to The Hives (‘Way Out’), but it’s consistently loud throughout, as if they’d just discovered the distortion knob on their Peavey amps, precisely the scenario you’d want to hear in this case.
Grade: A