3 out of 5

Produced by: The Monolith, Jay Pellicci, Steve Fogliani, Scott Solter

Label: Fortune Records

Blessed pop goodness.

From the opening buzz of guitars, keys, snapping drums, and lusciously layered male / female vocal harmonies, you pretty much know if this album is going to work for you or not.  If you’re down with that power pop crowd – think a slightly less alt-rock That Dog, or a less pixie The Murmurs – then the indelible sharpness of Monolith’s debut’s opening few tracks will have you pee-pee yourself with glee, convinced you’ve found the holy grail.

The compositions are varied and grabbing; the lyrics are actually interesting – thoughtful with a touch of darkness – and the song by song trade off between lead vocalists Dahlia Galin Rodriguez and Bill Rousseau (while, it should be mentioned, the music maintains a par of finger-snapping zeal despite who’s singing) tosses a nice dash of variation into the mix, drawing our attention to how well balanced this all is.

But, y’know, good things can’t last forever.  And, oddly, Monolith choose to sequence things in such a way to make this rather apparent, hitting the slow songs hard on the album’s latter half.  While there are still some good moments, such as Black Box Recorder’s brief string breakdown, and no song is by any means bad, they’re just rather generic in comparison to where we started.  Perhaps all their energy was used up front.

We conclude on the ambitious but puzzling Trilogy, which wants to be epic but can’t quite tie its three sections together into something more than, essentially, three separate songs.  Still, the desire to break a mold is there, and that, in itself, is exciting.  …Especially when the disc is on repeat and Trilogy gives way to those awesome opening tracks.