Amusement Parks on Fire - Self-titled

With the advent of mp3 blogs and the popularity of the Internet in general, a lot of bands garner some word of mouth buzz but often fail to live up to the hype. It's actually always been like this but seems to happen more and more now that anyone can be a mouthpiece about how amazing or groundbreaking a band is. More often than not, the band in question has some quality songs but aren't really changing the music scene. Enter Amusement Parks on Fire. Their name has been floating around on various blogs for several months now but never in the over the top manner that you hear about bands like Arcade Fire, or LCD Soundsystem. People just seemed to enjoy this debut album for no reason beyond it offering something a little different. Aside from having a fairly unfortunate name, the praise seems to be well deserved. The 43 minute disc offers up nine tracks of shoegazing goodness mixed with an understand of the proper amount of dramatics, and melody. "23 Jewels" and "Asphalt" serve as the instrumental pieces to break up the wall of guitars (one being a fantastic build up to the album highlight "Venus In Cancer," one being a strolling piano based slow build up to guitar drone... respectively). The "shoegazing" term often gets a bad rap for its indie rock pretentious association, but more often than not it's musicians making big music that has the capacity to swallow itself whole. The songs are driving, almost always building, and accompanied with earnest and sometimes detached vocals - drowning in the mix. Fans of My Bloody Valentine, Secret Machines, and Autolux will likely find something here pleasures their ears. [www.amusementparksonfire.com]