Ashtray Boy

Ashtray Boy’s laidback, at times jazzy indie pop goes even more international than usual on this clearinghouse effort, featuring not-quite-hi-fi tracks recorded and remixed between 2000 and 2002 in such far-flung locales as Australia, Germany, the U.S. and Canada. Members of the nomadic band’s various line-ups (of which there were three at last count in Sydney, Chicago and Vancouver) take part in the sessions, lead by Ashtray Boy crooner/principal Randall Lee. Over the course of proceedings, Lee manages to get his tongue around a variety of different languages including German, Portuguese, French and Spanish (among others) in a seeming effort to make some sort of statement about cultural identity in the context of the 2000 introduction of a continent-wide currency, the Euro. A tray-card smokescreen attempts to convince readers and listeners that the disc’s concept revolves around a species of wallaby known as the Euro, but that appears to be a ruse.