Citizen King: Mobile Estates

It's hard to believe that the Milwaukee band Citizen King has spent much of the last decade honing its dance-friendly, electronically enhanced party-rock sound in Midwest clubs while struggling with hot-and-cold-running major labels. After all, is there a song on the radio that's more in tune with popular music circa March 1999 than Citizen King's Beck-by-way-of-Sublime smash "Better Days (And The Bottom Drops Out)" (Well, there is that Joey McIntyre ballad, but that's another story.) Citizen King's eerie commercial timing and bald-faced derivativeness have already sparked the ire of a few critics, but it's hard to fault the group for its good fortune. Unlike, say, the work of Sugar Ray—which magically evolved from funk-metal to lazy, Sublime-style, Steve Miller-influenced party-pop when the winds of fashion shifted—Citizen King's early recordings sound like logical steps toward the surefire hit Mobile Estates, though they're nowhere near as slickly produced, sample-laden, or fully conceived. Not that it's necessarily easy to forgive Citizen King's wholesale appropriation of Beck's slurred deadpan vocals ("Closed For The Weekend" and a few others are unbelievably similar), or the inherently dispensable nature of its glossy, beat-driven pastiche of funk, pop, dance, rock, and hip hop. It's just that if you're looking for that sort of material, you could do a lot worse than this carefully assembled, hard-earned, several-hits-deep assortment of familiar, friendly, radio-ready candy.