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This extensive 100-song collection highlights a song from each year of the last century and delivers it with a bluegrass tinge and Stampfel’s distinctive yawping … it’s not pleasing to everyone, but it’s hard to argue with the encyclopedic choices.
They hit hard and they hit fast, with half of the songs here clocking in at two minutes or less, but they also hit sweet, with layers of boy-girl harmonies and drizzles of horn section.
No denying this band exists in a dual space of Gen X ridicule and genuine nostalgia. The new album is filled with the same sunny indie-rock wink-and-grin disposition that rightfully earned them the title, broadcasting into/from the airwaves of 1994.
One final challenge awaits: swim through the Reservoir of Bliss, filled with honey, liquid moonlight, and endorphins, then dance in slow motion across the infra-disco, as BRONCHO's underwater guitar syrup and whispered falsetto choruses are playing.
Unbridled rock and roll from the west of France, where the vehicles may be smaller but where the spirit of le garage lives on, giving us good opportunity to apply the term "howling" and generally act as American as a keg party in the woods.
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