Optiganally Yours: Spotlight On Optiganally Yours

Rob Crow made two occasionally brilliant pop albums with the San Diego band Heavy Vegetable before putting out a spotty solo disc and releasing records with Thingy and Optiganally Yours this spring. And while both new groups certainly have their moments, Thingy tries much harder (and more successfully) to recapture the hummable, fragmented pop beauty of Crow's old band. On the other hand, Optiganally Yours does bring a fascinating concept to life: It's a duo that arranges all its songs around a '70s Mattel toy called the Optigan, which worked sort of like a primitive sampler but sounded a bit like a scratchy old record player. Optiganally Yours, which consists of Crow and San Diego-based Optigan expert Pea Hix, does the best it can to create good pop songs out of such limited ingredients, but Spotlight On… is only occasionally successful. It sure is a nice idea, and the album is rarely boring, but the scratchy instrumental sounds tend to drain the songs of their melodic life. As an EP released a few months ago promised, Thingy nicely captures Heavy Vegetable's penchant for expertly packaging bits and pieces of pop songs into a dizzyingly catchy sound. Not that Songs About Angels, Evil, And Running Around On Fire sounds like just another Heavy Vegetable record; the tracks feel more fully formed and a bit more electric in spots, though the album lacks much of the wildly unpredictable spontaneity of Crow's past (and best) work. Still, fans of glistening pop music—and of restlessly creative groups like Guided By Voices—would do well to pick it up and give its 24 tracks a spin. As for Optiganally Yours, its album is best left to Crow's diehard fans and Optigan devotees.