Caught in the Carousel

The Telepathic Butterflies

Breakfast In Suburbia
Rainbow Quartz

The Winnipeg duo The Telepathic Butterflies (singer/guitarist Rejean Ricard and drummer Jacques Dubois) proved on their first two albums that they were a very good pop band, but their third long player is the one that proves they may very well be a great one. A power pop breeding of Blur's Parklife and The Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society, Breakfast In Suburbia is a fourteen-song polemic that argues what lives in the suburbs is not necessarily alive. Inspired by an early morning bikeride through the neighborhood, the album is not exactly a one way searing indictment of suburban life, but rather a series of insights, stories and observations that gently suggest the wasting of ones' life is a rather easy thing to do. There are meditations on conspicuous consumption ("The Trouble In Keeping Up With The Joneses" and "If It's All Too Much"), neighborhood dishing ("The Gossip Trail") and social rot ("A Scathing Report") and they're all handled with the fire of Paul Weller ("While You're Asleep") and the storytelling acumen of Ray Davies ("Mr. Dysfunctionality"). Later, "The Wishing Invisible" and "Sign Of The Times" sounds like a more muscular Squeeze and the psychedelia of "Facing Id" is a punchy winner. But it's "A Midlife Crisis" that really steals the show here. A smoldering and impossibly catchy rumination of a life not lived, the song's regretful, gut-wrenching sentiments—"I should have bought the sailboat/ I should have chased my dreams" and "I should have changed my ways/I should have made my peace")—are front and center and rendered in painful specificity.

—Alex Green