It’s hard to get excited about B-grade dub. Dub is one of those genres that bands who are playing it either really nail it down from the start or just kind of meander with the ideas and have no strong execution of them when all is said and done. The Beautiful Girls are one such band. Ziggurats is filled with a bunch of uninspiring dub-inspired numbers that sound almost comatose at times. For proof, look no further than the first two tracks here, “Royalty” and “Sir, Your Fashion Has the Cold Heart of a Killer (ugh). The former veers between overbaked rawk and listless dub while the latter is about as generic white boy dub as you can get. Both songs sound like they’re about to collapse from either ennui or exhaustion, which is funny considering there’s zero energy floating around here. However, when the band drops the dub nonsense and goes a power pop route, like on “Thought About You” complete with tasty handclaps, things get a little more interesting. Unfortunately, that only happens once out of 13 tracks total here. The rest of the album is spent doing retreads of the “Royalty” groove, or passing gas with uninteresting acoustic ditties (“Dela”). Stick to the pop, boys. (Controlled Substance Sound Labs 2007)
