Hey!Album Review

Sandy Masuo
MTV Online

By the time you get three tracks into M3's debut, you just know that here are the kind of guys who wear their sunglasses at night when they're hanging out with Sharona (though they wish that they had Jesse's girl). This spunky Georgia trio joins a long line of popsters, as innocuous as they are irresistible, that includes the Monkees, the Raspberries, the Knack, the Vapors and Sniff 'n' the Tears, among others. Despite the distinct retro air wafting around this sassy batch of tunes, the band keeps a respectful distance from "reinvention" or other heady post-modernist preoccupations, focusing instead on living in the perfect pop moment.

Wry titles like "You're So Yesterday" and "Vampires In Love" are colorful enough without any music, but M3 fleshes them out with hooks galore and lots of charmingly cheeky attitude. (If ever a band was ripe for a guest spot on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, M3 is it.) When frontguy and main songwriter Butch Walker spins lines like "I was a very dumb kid/Nobody ever touched me, quite like the way that you did/And you know that I suck at this, and you suck at it too/And now we're nothing more than vampires in love," he does it without a trace of smug adult irony. But the smarts aren't just in the lyrics. "Over Your Head," a sly rewrite of Steve Miller's "Space Cowboy," is as clever as it is reverent, as are most all of the band's Big Pop Gestures, from the bitter- sweet yearning of the ballady numbers ("Let Me Go," "Mrs. Jackson") to the snappy, tried-and-true chord progressions that fire up "Freak of the Week" and "Indie Queen," or the subtle flourishes of psychedelia that swirl in "Until You See" and "Lemonade."

There's nothing earth-shattering or mind-bogglingly innovative about this record. You won't listen to it endlessly trying to work out the deeper psycho-socio-aesthetic significance of these ditties, and that's perfectly fine. Marvelous 3 is a healthy reminder that sometimes a pop song is just a pop song.