the Amps Pacer

I listened to the Amps' Pacer at work, the first time I'd played the album in over ten years. Start to finish, the album played for about five minutes...or at least it seemed like only five minutes.

The album's just not memorable stuff. Apart from the fact that the Amps features Kim Deal, there's largely no other reason for a person to have kept the album in memory through the past decade. Neither amazing nor horrible, Pacer is a complete non-entity, and the album seems short in duration purely because there's nothing to grab a person's attention for longer than a few minutes.

The sad thing is, then, that I originally liked the Amps because it seemed so much more enjoyable than the Breeders. I liked the Breeders when the Safari EP came out, and it was understandable why Last Splash became a huge hit, but even then the band seemed like just another one of those mid-90s "college rock" bands that have proven to be neither crucial nor timeless...a glut of average (see also Pavement, Archers of Loaf, most of the Matador catalog, for that matter). The Amps, a much more lo-fi and raw affair (perhaps coinciding with Deal's increasing dalliances with fellow Dayton resident Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices fame), had much more of an immediate connection, and if not important, the Amps, at the very least, seemed more fun.

It was, and probably still is. Pacer's superfluous, fluffy fun, akin to nothing more than a piece of gum or a nice glass of juice. It's not horrible, it's not great, and it's not really worth much more than a few minutes of my attention.