Album Review: Hello Dragon – The Quantum Explorers

By Travis Woods

Release Date: 7.24.08

Label: Self-Released

A power-popped fission of spacey rock and melodic indie pop laced with boy/girl harmonies, Hello Dragon’s Quantum Explorers is a shiny and sun-glinted collection of oddball gems—under the acoustic/electric guitar interplay, reaching vocals and propellant rhythms are a cycle of lyrics circling subjects as disparate as Los Angeles, cryptozoology, and quantum physics. Despite the sideways angles of the off-kilter subject matter, the music is breezy, top-down road music, most especially the one-two punch of “Birds of Prey” and “Rats of L.A.” The former is a looping, pulsing drive of stuttered guitars and arcing vocal harmonies; the latter is such a lovely and concise distillation of epic, swinging pop choruses that it generates a near marionette-like headbobbing amidst the irresistible and ever-present “ahhhh woooo ohhhh”s so as to sound like the song Rivers Cuomo gave up trying to write and perfect twelve years ago.

Though the LP’s remainder may not reach the sheer heights of those two tracks, it remains a solid blast of radio-ready pop classicism blended with pop experimentalism; and besides, any album that features an acoustic tribute to a drunken Stephen Hawking hitting on sad barflies deserves a sit-down listen, though it sounds best when fighting for your attention against the jackhammer pulse of la la land pouring through your car windows.

August 6, 2008 | Filed Under Album Reviews, Exclusive Features 

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