Firewater: The Golden Hour

Following Tod A.'s disbanding of industrial-plus-melody ensemble Cop Shoot Cop,

he started Firewater in 1995 with the intention of strip-mining everything

shunted into the "world music" category: klezmer, Turkish pop, whatever. The

band's first album in four years was recorded over nearly three in India,

Pakistan, Turkey, and Israel—mostly in a studio in the latter, and

constantly leavened with laptop recordings from everywhere else. Few have ever

globe-trotted with such conservative results: The Golden

Hour is epic pop, angling most of its songs

around the four-minute mark and always aiming for an obvious melody and soaring

chorus. Unlike Britpop bands who do the same, the lyrics don't suffer from

bland romance; instead, they're full of passionate but rote anti-Bush sentiment

("Your mere existence is the worst bad dream that I ever knew"). When

stretching things out to an hour, Firewater—a predecessor to Gogol

Bordello, Beirut, and any other indie group assimilating Balkan-esque

influences—haven't made a record as concise or clever as it should have

been, but they can still knock out an anthem ("6:45") with refreshing

confidence.