In rock's answer to rap battling, Denver four-piece Dressy Bessy KO'ed mainstream goliath Coldplay on a June NPR broadcast pitting the bands against each other. In Bessy's corner, NPR's Ken Tucker gave mad props to the band's more, er, "electrifying" sound, while roasting Coldplay's soporific set. Not to sound all Darwinist here, but without competition there's little incentive for improvement, which would explain Electrified's concession to safe, suburbia-friendly new wave. Sure, on 2003's self-titled effort the band spit out their bubblegum sound and assumed a more grown-up persona, but frontwoman Tammy Ealom's miffed sexuality felt like playacting. That album's dolled up production gets dressed to the nines on Electrified, taking its mixing cues from Last Splash while settling for Veruca Salt-caliber songwriting.
Mid-tempo rocker "Stop Foolin'" best summarizes this problematic dichotomy. Innocuous power chords drag along a sedated, Pixies-inflected riff, with both dependent on Ealom's prominent and often nuanced vocals to substantiate the song's pedestrian structure. Ealom almost reconciles these influences on the standout title track, with her coy gasps ("you're six feet tall, electrified!") and riot grrrl 'tude ("Suspicion, don't push me down/ Your diction is off the wall") establishing a brusque female libido that would've been squelched on earlier albums. No way Ealom's sultry overemphasis on the first syllable of "dic-tion" passes on the fluffy Pink Hearts, Yellow Moons.
Unfortunately when Ealom sticks her neck out, no one's got her back. Electrified's rife with cardboard power chord progressions that should've been buried with all the other Nirvana aftermath opportunists. There's literally a stretch of six or seven songs here where I keep thinking I accidentally had the repeat button on. Fortunately the dry spots here aren't egregious, save for some cutesy Saddle Creek moments speckled throughout. Maybe Entertainment Weekly's right proclaiming the band "the best thing to come out of Denver since John Elway!", but if you hold indie supremacy over Colorado's music scene and the Denver Broncos, chances are your band's nothing but paper champs.
