The XYZ Affair A Few More Published Studies by: Riki Gardner Mon:24-Mar-08 Label: Independent Year: 2008 WB rating 67 out of 100

As far as middle-of-the-road records go, A Few More Published Studies, the new album from The XYZ Affair is right up there with the best of them. While not sonically breaking any new ground, it provides some level of adequate enjoyment to the listener and isn’t an entirely bad way to pass the time on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

The glass ceiling that A Few More Published Studies possesses is its completely generic approach to music creation. The album comes across as a rather uninspired melting pot of distorted guitars, auto-tuned harmonies and simple song structures which could have been churned out of any of today’s modern music factories. Yet, while bordering on ‘cookie-cutter’ rock in parts, the album does have some brief glimpses of musical adhesiveness, where most, if not all sections of a song seamlessly fit together. Case in point would be the relatively quiet ‘Until They Go Wrong’, where the vocal elements of the song meld with the instrumental to produce a cohesiveness and synergy belying the criticism of the band’s sometimes generic sound.

The XYZ Affair try desperately on A Few More Published Studies to produce the knockout, anthemic choruses one would expect on an album with a much larger production budget. Most of these miss the mark sonically, and subsequently the songs become victims of their own over-indulgence. This style of song creation is clearly evident on tracks such as the opening ‘Smile’, where a minimal verse structure is complimented with a loud chorus which seems as though it had been tacked on at the final stages of creation.

The tracks that rise above this, namely ‘The Oceania Roll’ and ‘All My Friends’, are more direct. They automatically stand out among the more cumbersome tracks on the album almost by default. ‘All My Friends’ presents itself as a roll-call to the listener, with lead singer Alex Feder seemingly going through a list of his friends and a personality trait related to each. This comes across as a somewhat schizophrenic affair at first, but once the listener figures out what is happening, the song becomes surprisingly enjoyable. Contrastingly, ‘The Oceania Roll’ is a simple acoustic track which shows that, without embellishment, Feder’s crooning vocals can be quite stirring in their own unique way.

This album, despite its attempts at embellishment, often borders on the generic music that we have come to expect from bloated, over-produced mainstream releases. The XYZ Affair have no doubt tried hard to fashion a grand-sounding release, but in so doing they have over-compensated with too much emphasis on in-studio production and not enough on cohesion.