It's hard to believe the Fastbacks have been around for fourteen years, not just because they aren't exactly a household name, but because they still sound so damn young. The Fastbacks are the Peter Pans of the Pacific Northwest: unreconstructed power-pop enthusiasts who still believe a modest tune delivered quickly is the expressway to your heart. If you're feeling unkind, you could call them Seattle's village idiots – simpletons because they believe in simple music; retards because rather than grow in the Eighties, they remained stubbornly adolescent. But the Fastbacks are not as naive as Kim Warnick and Lulu Gargiulo's childlike harmonies and Zücker's stubborn rejection of sophisticated technical values would make you think. Beneath the Fastbacks' percolations pulse the bedroom musings of a frustrated dreamer.

Kurt Bloch writes the Fastbacks' songs, plays punk-rock guitar leads and produced Zücker (he also moonlights in the Young Fresh Fellows). In some ways, this makes the Fastbacks a classic girl group: Like the Ronettes, ABBA and even the Cowboy Junkies, Warnick and Gargiulo mouth men's words (though they also play bass and guitar, respectively, in a democratic, DIY band, giving them more power than their predecessors). This distance between the lyrics' inspiration and their delivery often makes the tunes sound oddly disconnected: Lead singer Warnick's monotone can belie Bloch's angst. The Fastbacks have been mistaken for a happy love-rock band, when actually Bloch's a deep, and deeply unhappy, guy.

Of course, this alienated effect is probably his perverse intention; after all, the album's title is the German word for sugar. The songs read like strange, existential meditations – "When I make coffee in the morning, I take some, just a little bit, out of its cup and put it in the clock by my bed," Warnick sings on "Kind of Game" – but they're played like Romper Room rock. Ten of the fourteen tracks are less than three minutes long (six clock in at less than two). Tellingly, the longest is the 3:37 opus "When I'm Old," whose melancholy sentiment hints that the Fastbacks may be realizing there's a limit to how long they can be career amateurs. (RS 655)

EVELYN MCDONNELL