Music Reviews

Pop Canon

D’Art

It’s not often you find a CD where an intentionally-dangled preposition appears just so the lyric can correct it in the next breath. Or a love song in which all one’s possessions are stored in a shed because potential inlaws don’t realize the protagonist and his S.O. are living together. Or a song where a potential mother-in-law calls the cops on the protagonist, or where the protagonist ends up running down a road naked. And only on a Pop Canon CD could this all happen in the first song alone.

For the uninitiated, Pop Canon are the Gainesville avant-pop sextet whose ability to mix odd time-signatures, wildly different styles, obscure literary references, and dadaist humor is pretty much unsurpassed. This 14-song, self-produced (along with Mike Rotolante at Gainesville’s Mirror Image Studios) CD is the follow-up to 1997’s Kingdom of Idiot Rock , and includes ruminations on the artist as fundamental orifice and on religion, a five-minute instrumental semi-psychedelic rave-up and a couple tracks that could almost pass (if you weren’t paying attention) for ballad-y love songs. And even though the CD contains a song that sounds rather ska-ish, remember: Pop Canon is not a ska band!

Pop Canon, PO Box 14872, Gainesville, FL 32604; http://www.popcanon.com


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