You can tell by the name… easy to love if bliss-pop is your thing, and infuriating if it’s not, the Oohlas are a pop-drenched trio that test the limits of the word ‘overbearing’. Lead by former Everclear drummer Greg Eklund on guitar, his brother, Mark fills in on bass/vocals, and Ollie Stone adds another layer of guitar and vocals to combine for a geyser of music that you could pour on pancakes. A host of drummers appear on the band’s debut Best Stop Pop, and there is a lot of sound to process - too much - that never lets up from start to finish.

Of course, the album is likeable - what’s a pop record if not accessible, as a minimum? The first two songs ‘Gone’ and ‘Tripped’ start the album off right, and you enjoy them for the same reasons that make you tire of Best Stop at it’s midpoint - endless fuzz guitars, female vocals heavy on the cute side, and hurried tempos that never change time signature or dynamics.

If you’re already tired of the enthusiasm of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Camera Obscura, then this is not for you because the Oohlas exemplify what is already out there, only they offer more of it at once. The band has all the elements in line to make them blend in with today’s favorite flavor, and with the longevity of a Snickers fun-size candy bar (which is actually less fun).

The New Pornographers, for example, found a way to maintain an untenable balance that keeps each release from being cloying and syrupy as it gets denser and richer. The Oohlas, however, fail at that unlikely mix of ecstasy and subtlety, having buried each track with layers of synth upon guitar upon synth’d guitar, and so on. They are just trying to get onto this wave before it crests, and so they drown us in a stew of effects and hooks to get there.

The production is mostly to fault, because the songs are well written, and for all the peppy contents, there are a couple of surprising turns that have greater depth than a blue jeans commercial. Stone makes us uncomfortable and claustrophobic on the album’s closer, ‘The Rapid’, as she wigs out about being overcrowded and overloaded.  It achieves the intended effect, but goes on a bit longer than was necessary to get the point across (okay, germs are everywhere and packed venues suck… there’s a metaphor in there somewhere, I think).

Had the band been established on more original ground, the jokes would go over a little better. Take the shrill ‘TV Dinner’ for example: Stone wails and demands to know, “Why… don’t…. you…. love meeeeeeee?!” in the voice of an adolescent waif who can’t understand that we don’t love her because she’s asking us at the top of her tortured lungs in the middle of a crowded cafeteria. It’s teenage whininess trying to be funny, but it could be regretfully anthemic for the dumped girls who take it seriously and identify with it. Poor boyfriends.  Sure, most high school memories are laughable now, but my skin still crawls when I think of the icky and clutching Amanda [last name withheld] from Junior year who kept asking me basically the same question, and this song brings it all back.

The Oohlas aren’t contemptible for trying to fit in without rattling anyone’s cage, and the genre hasn’t quite worn out its welcome, but it will as the stream floods with new bands whose only contribution to the medium is to add more, more, more and more to existing structures.

Released September 26, 2006
Stolen Transmission
5/10

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