Want to hear yet another indie road trip album? Their karma rolled over your dogma. Barf! A Colored Screen of the Outside World is a bumper sticker slogan-totin' lyrical hamsterpiece. The overture, "In a Small White Car," starts with a nice folksy violin and breaks into a tornado of a refrain. By track two, though, you realize Dorothy's still in fucking Kansas. What could have been an earnest record reveals itself as flower-sniffing hipster apathy. Even songs about suicide and anorexia tumble awkwardly off the conveyor belt: "Eat a diet pill for breakfast cause/she don't drink coffee, oh, ok/I liked your body from the start/except the maggots in your brain, ok, ok." An indignant resignation, a numbing dissatisfaction, but with the pretense of agitated happiness, ok, ok. This vehicle is weak, bland and canned. Bring it on the road for the long haul to apathy. BRIAN H. GRIFFEY

DICKEL BROTHERS
Volume Two
(Empty Records)
**

Ah, I miss the days of assigned square dancing partners, when I dreamed of sloppy frenchies with some fucker who would later make fun of my perm and red pants, then recruit dozens of pre-teen bitches to snicker behind my back.

Maybe I don't miss those days after all. And maybe I don't need them dredged back up every five stinking minutes by those goddamn demonic Dickel Brothers. Dickel Brothers Dickel Brothers--I'll get you! Perhaps if you have some nostalgia attached to your do-si-do memories you'd enjoy the music of these folksters. Don't expect to see me there however, because I'll be undetectable in camouflage. KATIE SHIMER

FONTANELLE
Fontanelle
(Kranky)
*

Oh the banality! The children of Tortoise continue littering the musical landscape with their useless post-rock dung. Arch noodlers Fontanelle, late of Jessamine, bring on Mr. Sandman at three speeds: Boring, exceedingly boring, and watching-paint-dry boring. Anyone who considers artless jamming actual music, I've got twelve basements of 16 year-olds you can come over and record right now.

But Fontanelle are "experienced" grown-ups. Where is their wisdom? Oh yeah! Vocals just get in the way of neat one-handed keyboard playing. Fontanelle claim to have antecedents in Can and electric Miles Davis. What they need to do is can all their existing songs, instead of foisting them on the unsuspecting public. Shame on you, Kranky. TED THIEMAN