Spiv – Don’tcha Know (Pop Sweatshop)

I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Or a cd. But after you realize that you’re listening to more bad promo cds than music you actually like, you start to look for ways to weed out the absolute crap. Spiv’s Don’tcha Know boasts what is quite possibly the worst album artwork in the history of recorded music. The picture on the cover sort of looks like Pat La Penna though, so I decided to give it a listen (as opposed to writing a review without actually listening to the record, a trick I learned from Richard Meltzer, and first attempted in my recent Foo Fighters review as somewhat of an homage to Meltzer).

The funny thing is that when I first put on the album, I was shocked that the first song, “Don’tcha Know,” was actually good. It sounds like a mid-seventies Kiss-style rocker. But then each song got less and less good until finally there was some kind of looped sample and “rapping” that was so lame and so bad that I had to rip the cd out of my walkman and hurl it off the El platform like it was a frisbee covered in anthrax.

I held onto the jewel case though because it’s so damn funny.