*** Tommy's Darkling Thrush

SOUL KILLER

(Flying)

These locals from Reading, Massachusetts, named themselves after Thomas Hardy's poem "The Darkling Thrush." So we can conclude that at least one out of the three band members reads poetry. Sometimes they write it too. "The Price of a Kiss," a love song about relationships, and my favorite, "Harriet Wheeler, Please Sing This Song," have beautiful lyrics, but like too much of this album, the arrangements are over-dense, over-weighty, and overplayed. Nonetheless, Soul Killer gets points for its variety of moods, styles, and textures. The influence of bands like Ride, the Smiths, and the Cure helps make Tommy's Darkling Thrush sound psychologically probing, if at times musically unexciting.

-- Anna Lazebnik