I was wrong, it's not ska. It's also not distinctive, catchy, or anything else that makes me glad I picked it up. Left End Girlfriend is solidly crafted pop rock with a slight distorted edge to the guitar and bass tones, and Russ Armstrong's lyrics are actually trying for something on a few of the tracks. But it's hard to muster the energy to pay attention to them because every song sounds the same, and that sound is dreadfully dull.
The album's not bad, per se, and in a way that's the sad thing about it. Nothing about this band is virtuosic, but they can play, they can sing, and they can record--sound, mix, and production are all fine--but going by this disc at least they lack the musical imagination to do anything with their skills. They function well as a group, but there's nothing here to distinguish them from a million other post-grunge melodic rock bands that wrote mediocre songs and spiked them with a little fuzz.
There are no surprises in the songwriting or arrangements, almost no overdubs that I can hear, and almost no soloing (there's a little in Matchless. Maybe elsewhere that I forgot but there's a massive thunderstorm threatening to kill the power so I'm finishing this on a laptop away from my desktop's notes file on the first half of the album, and I'm not listening to the earlier songs again). There's basically no sense of humor either, which is fine except that it makes the cover art seem like a bizarre choice and, frankly, more entertaining than the actual record. The one note of it comes in X-Girlfriend, which repeats the line "Martians stole my brain" and also has the album's one audible overdub, some sci-fi synths for atmosphere.
I don't want to beat up on these guys; I've got nothing against them and there's worse music out there. Plus, the Ms. Perfect song isn't sexist after all--I'm not sure why the scare quotes are there--and props to them for a song about bulimia. There's just nothing that sticks in my head, and I say this as someone who can still remember The Flys 20 years later.
Discogs says that despite those other albums named on the back, Fizzbin's output is just this disc and an EP. Other than that and a couple Amazon and eBay hits, every other search result is about the Star Trek TOS game that they're named after which is news to me; I was a Next Gen guy.
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