The power pop almost-supergroup
Fotomaker's first album was very strong, full of good songs and excellent performances and sounding very much like one would expect a band with a former member of
the Raspberries on board. Their second album,
Vis-à-Vis, fumbles away any success that the first album might have brought by being markedly inferior and so slick that it almost slides right off the turntable. It is a very thin-sounding album with all the instruments separated and clinically recorded; it lacks any sense of excitement at all, which is what the best power pop has to have. For the most part, the songs lack hooks and the arrangements are flat and unimaginative. Only a couple of songs ("Miles Away" and "Come Back") have any of the spirit and verve that the songs on the first album did. They are not enough to make up for bad songs like the plodding "Name of the Game," the generic piano-led trifle "Does She Dance," and the bar band-lite blues-rocker "Snowblind." The first record sounded like it was made by a bunch of rockers who couldn't believe their luck at finding each other and also finding a great sound. This album sounds like it was made by tired and bored rockers who had run out of ideas. ~ Tim Sendra