Varsity Drag

For Crying Out Loud

BY Michael EdwardsPublished Sep 1, 2006

Theoretically, there should be a lot more fuss about a new album feature Ben Deily. After all, he was a member of the Lemonheads for the first three albums, before butting heads in a spectacular fashion with Evan Dando. He still managed to write quite a few cool pop songs before disappearing into relative obscurity for quite some time. Yet in that time, not much has changed for Deily. His current band, Varsity Drag, play power pop songs that could have come out at almost any time during his entire career. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and there’s no denying that he still knows how to add the right number of hooks to a song to make it instantly hummable. But Deily seems almost too hung up on making this sound like his old band, right down to the lo-fi production values, instead of moving on and crafting a new niche for himself. For Crying Out Loud is fine for what it is, but isn’t going to be the kind of record that returns Deily and his band-mates to the spotlight again.
(Boss Tuneage)

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