Fuzzbubble had a brief 15 minutes of fame in 1998 as the first rock act signed to Sean "Puffy" Combs' Bad Boy Entertainment. The band played on his platinum rock remix of "It's All About the Benjamins," before being unceremoniously dropped from the label without releasing any music of its own.
It is probably just as well, because on the evidence of Fuzzbubble's self-titled debut full-length, it must have been an extremely uneasy marriage (a fact confirmed by the hilarious hidden track, a remade Beat jazz parody of "Benjamins"). In fact, Fuzzbubble is almost shocking — in the most delightful of ways — to hear, particularly the first time you put it on, and about as far from East Coast hip-hop as music can get. It offers the band the opportunity to reclaim its true audience and identity, and shake the stigma that may have lingered from its short stint as a rap mogul experiment.
The album is a full-on guitar pop assault that returns Fuzzbubble to its rightful place in the Los Angeles indie pop scene. The opening "Bliss" immediately sets forth the band's modus operandi. The song takes a slight alteration of the melody from "Back in the U.S.S.R." and juxtaposes it against a chorus borrowed straight from Nirvana's Nevermind. [ ... ] Jim Bacchi's songwriting is downright infectious even in the face of the grinding guitars, peppered with huge, bright melodies. [ ... ] The hooks are monsters — simply enormous.
Mike Clink (Guns N' Roses) polishes the music to an almost blinding sheen, which is the perfect approach given the high level of energy created by the quartet. It is the only way that power pop this heavy on the power half of the equation should sound.
Stanton Swihart