Album Review: Introducing by Brilliant Colors

I once had a co-worker who swore by short albums. His rationale was that, on a truncated album, bands usually brought their very best songs to the table. Citing Pearl Jam’s recent Backspacer as an example – the album only runs about 36 minutes – he also felt that short albums meant that the artist in question didn’t have to resort to adding extra verses or bridges just to pad out a record’s running time.

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Clocking in at just under 23 minutes, Introducing, Brilliant Colors' 2009 debut, flits by like a will-o'-the-wisp. It's just enough time to get a decent impression of what the band has to offer: refreshingly raw yet smart indie pop, reminiscent of old-school New Zealand indie pop acts (the Chills, the Bats) and the puckish side of C-86 (Talulah Gosh). At their strongest, Brilliant Colors are gutsy and tender, nocturnal and innocent -- a spine-tingling blend of pop-oriented fizz and punk-influenced grit.

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Slumberland Records has maintained a recognizable aesthetic for most of its 20 years in existence. From the earliest Velocity Girl singles to last year's Pains of Being Pure at Heart full-length, its records share an affinity for washes of reverb, bubblegum melodies, and shoestring-budget production. Even their most recent records have an aged patina to them, as if every album they were ever going to release was recorded in the late 1980s.

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Musicians have been ripping off each other since, well, ever. So, when I put in the Brilliant Colors disk and heard Absolutely Anything, a track that sounds exactly like Nena’s 99 Luftballoons, I wasn’t surprised. I was just annoyed—annoyed that this track was the only track on the album that sounded markedly different from any of the other tracks.

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