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Perhaps as much as anything else, the self-titled independent debut from Atlanta's Smash Nova represents a melding of the more obvious facets of rock and pop over their last fifteen years.  The lead-off track, "Letter," a rollicking, riff-heavy Dear John letter set to music, takes its prototypically late '80s power chord structures and undergirds them with an agile and infectious pop sheen.  In the same way, lead singer Kasia's voice, itself a combination of Siouxie Sioux's drowsy, dissonant timbre and Belinda Carlisle's pop-minded inflections, finds an equally ideal niche inside the finely crafted follow-up, "Before I Fall."  Where the first half of the release is more than a bit reminiscent of the '80s hard rock and pop-metal scenes, the latter two songs on the EP introduce a decidedly more contemporary set of trappings.  "If You Were Here" and "Playing with Fire (All About You)" are energetic, albeit slightly less melodic, entries that feature the alternatively clean and sludgy guitar runs and melancholy outlook that have been stock-in-trade for the post-grunge movement since its inception in the early '90s.

Although the musical portion of the album exhibits a fairly uniform quality from start to finish, the lyrical side of the album is a bit more of a hit-or-miss affair.  "If You Were Here" (What were you thinkin' after all this time / Didn't it occur to you that life ain't a crime) contains more than its share of lyrical cliche's, while "Playing with Fire" uses similarly overreaching language (Poison the dreams we used to have / And everything just kind of died) in its awkward attempt at making a grand statement.  To the album's credit, though, the word pictures drawn by "Before I Fall" (Cut my hands on yesterday / But I don't feel it too much today) are both poignant and insightful.  And the delightfully flippant humor of "Letter" (So I sent you a letter / Ripped up your favorite sweater / Broke all your forty-five records) forms the perfect foil for the song's otherwise somber survey of relational strife.

All said, the Smash Nova debut offers a fairly proficient, if sometimes overly familiar, tutorial of pop/rock's past decade and a half.   And although it falters lyrically in places, it nonetheless holds a commendably realistic mirror up to the darker, more difficult side of the human experience and as such is bound to be both an accessible and rewarding listen to a large portion of those who hear it.

Bert Gangl 5/19/2001