The first time my ears heard "Come on Petunia" from Poor Aim, I quickly fell in love with The Blow's quirky brand of pop. The clever doo-wop sampling of The Police classic "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" is something P. Diddy or Kanye would be jealous of. Something that clever just doesn't come along too often. So I hunted down Poor Aim and absorbed every ounce of pop brilliance until I was blue in the face. However, your eyes (and ears) don't deceive you — Paper Television is a messy disappointment on every level.
Gone is the quirk, replaced by paint-by numbers beats and the most unoriginal take on electronic pop imaginable. I understand that an album's worth of imaginative pop is hard to follow, but Khaela Maricich has done it before. Having three distinct yet equal albums to pull from, Paper Television should have been a no-brainer of an album to make. Instead, it has no brains and no heart. Maricich is desperately hoping to coax us onto the dance floor with the right combinations of beats and sounds, but without her heart and without her genius pushing the music to new heights, the soulless pop electronica bores a hole in your temple. Without the cuteness and the ingenuity, Paper Television is nothing more than a generic product being peddled to the hapless masses. Maricich has turned her quaint mom-and-pop operation into an ugly conglomerate. The more I fought to find what I was looking for, the more I became lost in the maze of readymade aisles of canned sound. Now, there's just a massive mess in aisle 3, and Maricich is left to clean it up.
1. Pile of Gold
2. Parentheses
3. The Big U
4. The Long List of Girls
5. Bonjour Juene Fille
6. Babay (Eat a Critter, Fell its Wrath)
7. Eat Your Heart Up
8. Pardon Me
9. Fists Up
10. True Affection
More about: The Blow
