Capitol
2004
Noise From The Basement
About This Album
Apparently Canada is full of spunky teenage girls with kicky names and brash fashion sense, ready and waiting to trick out their diary entries with professional mixing and the ragged ring of loud guitars. They'll then take the tapes to our shared border, amassing there under spangled denim signal flags, and their ensuing invasion will lighten our dreary lives with catchy tales of skipping school and kissing cuties. Unlike her predecessors, Toronto's Skye Sweetnam isn't here to b**ch. She secures the complicated conch Fefe Dobson so briefly held with 13 songs about one thing, which is nicely summarized in the utterly inescapable hook to "Billy S." "Feel for once what it's like to rebel now," she says, and chases it with a 21st century twist on the Bard's phrasing: "To skip or not to skip/That is the question." Noise from the Basement doesn't dwell on weighty emotions, or prop its centerpiece up in entirely unrealistically sexy situations. It's not even down with being bratty, though that style's here like magic-marker doodles on the knees of Sweetnam's jeans. No. Instead of playing rebel, this one wants a widescreen teen movie rewrite of 21st century real life.
Track List (try tracks 3,4,6 and 8)

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