A Balladeer - Where Are You Bambi Woods? (Zip)

With an album title (and title track) like this, and other tunes such as “Superman Can’t Move His Legs,” “Jesus Doesn’t Love Me,” and “Dead as Disco,” you might expect Where to be a funny album. Instead, this Dutch band’s second LP (originally released on a major there two years ago, and just appearing Stateside now, the market of its muse) is another highly-crafted, warm pop album that’s consumed with U.S. culture of the recent past. I.E., Woods, girl-next-door blonde star of the most famous porn film other than Deep Throat , 1978’s Debbie Does Dallas , really did disappear off the cultural/news radar in the ‘80s after making four XXX films seemingly without trace, and her long-rumored drug OD death has never been confirmed; even the directors of the serious 2005 British TV documentary Debbie Does Dallas Uncovered couldn’t find her (albeit they talked to someone claiming to be Woods via telephone). Lead-Balladeer Marinus de Goederen uses her mysterious evaporation as an emblem of the darker/naughtier/corrupt side of American cultural hegemony, felt acutely abroad. Indeed, songs concerning sin city Las Vegas, Jackie Kennedy , California, Dean Martin and Marilyn Monroe , the 1998 Laramie beating death of gay U. of Wyoming student Matthew Wayne Shepard , and 1984 slasher film A Nightmare on Elm Street blend into a thoughtful meditation pot of brooding lush, pianocentric Euro-pop, with occasional excursions into slightly more commercial radio fodder in a reasonable U2/Coldplay mode (“Welcome to Vegas”). Fascinating all around, for its foreign perspective and mannered music. (ziprecords.com)