Sunny Day Sets Fire: Summer Palace

Sunny Day Sets Fire's debut full-length certainly

has the right raw elements to make Elephant 6 devotees' summers a little

brighter. Operating on the reasonable theory that everything sounds better when

sprinkled with glockenspiel and power-pop guitars, Summer

Palace

has sunshine and chord changes to spare. Likeable enough in theory, it's

dragged down by misplaced ambition: Two-thirds of the songs clock in at more

than four minutes long, and the whole thing adds up to an hour, far too

ungainly to be spritely. Everything ends up melting into a haze of diffuse

perkiness. The odd hiccup intrudes: "End Of The Road" has a guitar line that

sounds suspiciously like "Hotel California," but soon tames it with obligatory

hand-claps. "Siamese" is a nice shot of melancholy, but it's a momentary

deviation. If Blonde Redhead has made the world safe for weird international

combinations of musicians—this band represents Italy, Hong Kong, Canada,

and the UK—to revamp classical pop formulas, SDSF would do better to try schizophrenic formalism rather than this monolithic approach.