You know the scene: the members of Spinal Tap are meeting with their manager to assess what went wrong. Their request for a nineteen foot replica of Stonehenge yielded a nineteen inch version of the same. The design was right, but the scale of the model was way off. New Record Highs suffers a similar fate. The plan looks good—Post-Hüsker Dü Bob Mould or Taang-era Lemonheads—but the scale, the magnitude, is a fraction of what it needs to be. The guitars are soft and watery where they need to be harsh and massive. The tempos are easy going where they need to be frantic. “New Rules for June” and “Your Cinema” would have made a good single—they’re faster, more aggressive—but the other songs are too small. End result: a disc in danger of being trampled by dwarves.
–Mike Faloon (No Effort, myspace/readythejet)