The Boo Radleys: Kingsize

Huge in Britain, The Boo Radleys always remained just below the surface here, and each of the group's albums has contained at least three or four tracks suggesting that that's a shame. The new Kingsize, the band's most fully realized album to date, surpasses its predecessors in a number of respects, the volume of incredibly catchy songs not the least of them. The up-tempo "Free Huey," for instance, with its endlessly repeated "be all you can be" chorus, may be about as lyrically inventive as a Fatboy Slim single, but there's really no resisting it, either. Songwriter Martin Carr shows an ability to go for more than just the throat throughout Kingsize, particularly on the plaintive "Monuments For A Dead Century" and the sunny "Jimmy Webb Is God." Moments in which Carr blurs the line between inventiveness and merely sounding busy—as well as a tendency on some tracks to fall back on the standard post-Screamadelica Keith Richards-goes-to-a-rave formula—keep Kingsize from being the masterpiece it clearly strives to be. But when it works, it works really well, and remains consistently interesting even while it's not consistently involving.