Her Space Holiday: XOXO Panda And The New Revival Kid

Damn the inventor of catchy but uninteresting music. Damn him to hell! And while we're at it; damn Her Space Holiday for taking tips from said inventor.

When will artists realise that making music that only has the ability to stick isn’t good music? Implanting a song into someone’s brain with a singular hook does not show style or substance and frankly over the past few years we’ve had enough.

Marc Bianchi – better known by his stage name Her Space Holiday – has been in the music industry for over a decade now and has toured with a fair amount of bands, a list including Bright Eyes and Pinback no less. It seems fitting then, that his name is still relatively unheard of when held up against such artists. Comparatively HSH is a fishing boat to the magnificent cruise liner that is the aforementioned peers.

The whole album stays confined within its own little comfort zone, padding out the space it’s already trodden before. Indeed, it keeps so stringently to its own constructed formula that six songs it's almost time to wave the white flag. But no, surrender not accepted. We're not even half-way through at this point. This wouldn't be such a calamity if he had more to offer than just middle of the road folk/pop.

Not that there’s anything legitimately wrong with his sound per se, track four is actually quite good but there’s just never a lot going on, it never demands your attention. Always happy to just be there, never striving to be the entertainer or jostling for the attention of the world.

On the lyrical side of things we have a grand total of two modes; inoffensively simple or innocently dumb, your choice. Sleepy Tigers is a perfect example: ”I like you so very much, so much in fact I gotta wake you up. It's not that I have words to speak, I just wanna see you look at me”. It may be innocent but it sure isn’t clever.

It’s a shame as well, since his vocals hold an odd 'laidback Rivers Cuomo' feel and could actually be considered one of the few things keeping this album from completely sinking.

“The Boys and Girls” is a surprisingly gentle track with a promising intro. Then, true to form, it spirals into the hand-clappingly mundane realm of happy-go-lucky pop.

With so much time in the industry and so many great bands around him, it’s frustrating to see HSH fall into the category of contrived pop music, especially when there are so many glimmers of promise. It's not like there aren't good ideas, lacking instead is the layering of these good ideas to build fully realised, good songs.

In keeping with today's theme while we sum up "XOXO Panda and the New Revival Kid" via the art of the score, we’ll go for a nice, middle of the road, boring...