Get Set Go - Sunshine, Joy & Happiness

All Music Guide

With their fourth album, notparticularlyironically subtitled "A Tragic Tale of Death, Despair and Other Silly Nonsense," Get Set Go have reached the Abraham Lincoln stage of their career, as in the president's famous quote, "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like." Anyone who has already discovered the Los Angeles quintet, either through their earlier albums or through their tracks on the Grey's Anatomy soundtrack CDs, will find Sunshine, Joy and Happiness to be more of the same, for better or worse. For newcomers, singer/songwriter Mike TV's signature trick of matching bouncy, upbeat pop melodies along the lines of the Shins or Ben Folds to scabrous, depressive lyrics will likely be quite bracing, at least at first. Over the course of a lengthy 17track album, however, the conceit begins to pall. Solid melancholy pop songs like "Jesus Christ In Reverse" suffer next to trite "everything sucks" grumps like the painfully simplistic social commentary ...of "Modern Age," and by the time of the cutesy "O My Lord" (basically a rewrite of Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz" minus the blues and the irony, and at over twice the length), it just all gets really tiresome. - Stewart Mason, All Music Guide Read more Less