Tuscadero: My Way Or The Highway

When Tuscadero's The Pink Album first came out, it seemed an awful lot like insincere kitsch: With its cutesy, bouncy pop—and its cover art, which was designed to look like a grade-school notebook—the album was a bit too sugary to stomach in large doses. Then a major label snapped up the band and reissued The Pink Album, complete with a few ultra-slick remixes that made Tuscadero sound almost exactly like The Go-Go's. On the new My Way Or The Highway, Tuscadero continues to straddle the line between too-cute and too-slick: "My Johnny" is far too Happy Days for its own good, while "Hot Head" and the single "Paper Dolls" are just a shade overproduced. But as illustrated on quirky material like "Dr. Doom," Tuscadero is still a fun guilty pleasure, and its members are getting better at making sun-shiney pop records with enough menace to sound great when cranked out of car stereos. Still, if you don't have much of an appetite for saccharine, you might want to steer clear; those who can take it will get a kick out of My Way Or The Highway's caffeinated buzz.