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V/A
MTV2 HANDPICKED
(COLUMBIA)

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MTV still hasn’t had much luck garnering anything close to the kind of universal exposure the music-video channel captured back in the "I Want My MTV" formative years of the early ’80s for its young and struggling sister station, MTV2. Most cable subscribers simply can’t get M2, and as of yet the savvy MTV marketing department just hasn’t come up with an effective "I Want My ... " ploy to step up demand. Handpicked isn’t going to do the trick, but if the dozen-and-a-half tracks compiled here are any indication, I wouldn’t mind having my M2. Like MTV in its pre-hair-sprayed metal salad days, the M2 playlist leans toward the quirkier, mildly adventurous side of the pop spectrum, encompassing everything from the dreamy Britpop of Travis’s "Sing" and Coldplay’s sleeper hit "Yellow," to the wry, post-grad hookery of Cake’s "Short Skirt/Long Jacket" and Tenacious D’s "Wonderboy," with a satisfying slice of neo-Americana courtesy of Ryan "Whiskeytown" Adams’s Mellencamp-y (or, perhaps more Cougarish) "New York, New York" and the requisite dose of upbeat electronica supplied by the "US Mix Edit" of Lo Fidelity Allstars’ "Sleeping Faster." The M2 strategy has its drawbacks — finding a track by Radiohead (in this case "Idioteque"), a band who are rightly revered for the integrity they bring to their work, next to an overly slick offering from an outfit who sound as calculated as Ours can be as unsettling as seeing a video by the Clash segue into the latest from Duran Duran. And Handpicked has its share of generic efforts by bands who are too transparent in their attempts to please modern rock-radio programmers — Stereomud’s trying-to-be-aggro metal "Pain" and Dave Navarro’s soul-bearing (and somewhat side-splitting) "Rexall." But there are some welcome discoveries here too — even if Columbia’s affiliation with the project probably had something to do with squeezing their signing Pete Yorn’s "Life On A Chain" into the disc’s second slot, it doesn’t change the fact that his debut was one of the better overlooked albums of 2001.

BY MATT ASHARE

Issue Date: February 14 - 21, 2002
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