Phantom Planet – The Guest
(Sony)

Movie stars wanna rock. Nothing new, and not reallymentioning, considering how many embarrassmentscelebrities have brought upon them entering the musicindustry.

So why should Phantom Planet get any recognition? Itcould be because Phantom Planet is the pet project ofour beloved Max Fischer. Thats right, Mr. JasonSchwartzman of “Rushmore” fame. Singer Alex Greenwaldhas had his share of fame too, playing bully SethDevlin in “Donnie Darko”.

For the most part, Phantom Planet’s “The Guest” works. After a previous album “Phantom Planet is Missing”that also received decent reviews, the band seems tohave honed their craft a bit more and have puttogether an album that closely resembles earlyRadiohead mixed with 70s style Partridge Family popmusic. Specifically, Alex Greenwald’s voice resemblesthat of upper-level Radiohead ripoff band Muse. Bitsand pieces of Sloan and Jimmy Eat World style are alsonoticable.

“California” opens with piano and a nice melody andhook that immediately gets your attention and has astrong guitar/drums build as Greenwald bellows “Herewe come”.. The song seems to be one of those “just gothome from touring” tracks, and is tailor made for the”Orange County” soundtrack of which it was a part of.

Most of the songs follow this type of lead, a slow tomid-tempo ballad such as “Lonely Day” and “In OurDarkest Hour” has pretty much the same arrangement asa slightly faster song such as “Hey Now Girl”, whichjust begs for Archies comparisons. There have been alot of people comparing Phantom Planet to Weezer andPavement, and the packaging sticker even uses this asa selling point, however the songs really don’t carrythe edge that either of those bands have, beating youover the head with how cute and fun they are withoutany sort of depth or emotion other than “happy to bealive”. A song such as “Anthem”, with lyrics such as”what the world needs is an anthem and I hoping thatthe world will sing along” , could really drive peoplenuts.

But thats all well and good for me, sometimes you needa dumb happy power pop record, and this one does thetrick. If you can stand incredibly cutesy andsometimes cheesy pop, Phantom Planet just might be foryou. A lot of potential in this group – they couldreally explode into a huge radio band. — Goon