Transmission

Not the convoy of survivalist glam necessary to lure back the public the band annoyed after the disgruntled and over-hyped Leisure Noise, Gay Dad's sophomore LP goes for a lo-fi yet more sonically complex approach and hits another brick wall of Queen-tailored rhetoric and pyrotechnic rock anthems. During the two-year wait between albums, Gay Dad had pared itself down to a three-piece, and the result is a positive, more direct, and raging jangle of '70s-fixated British pop. It works well in the Axl Rose-fronts-Super Furry Animals "Harder Faster" or in the bare and tender thud of "Breathe." So well in fact that you almost forget Gay Dad's unpersuasive threads of extremist pop-metal ("Dinosaur") that populate the rest of the album. Transmission, while marginally stronger than the band's debut, forgets to bring along the same natural pop drive and offers more of the same well-honed faux iconic babble, and regularly stoops to the equivalent of a Love record with improper squelch control.