Pretentious, marginally talented New York singer-songwriters are an already obnoxious lot. But when you take some wanna-be neo-space-cowboy like Drazy Hoops, with music so utterly devoid of life it could be the soundtrack to an autopsy, things really start to get ugly. Hoops isn't a bad musician -- he strums his guitar as well as the next hack, and his monotone vocals aren't overtly grating -- but he sure is a boring one. Hoops' Leonard Cohen-goes-alt-country concept is fairly simple yet utterly ineffective. And how seriously can anyone who calls himself Drazy Hoops expect to be taken, anyway? Too seriously, from the sound of this album-length yawn. Want stupid song titles? Drazy's got ya covered: "The Moon Lies," "Feel the Snake" and "Soul Like the Sun" could've been lifted from the pages of the This Is Spinal Tap script. And check the junior-high prose on "The Sun God's Laughing": Trees keep reaching for the sun/But the sun god's laughing at my lack of fun/We'll blow it all to kingdom come/In the long run. Mr. Hoops, you so Drazy! For those who think that music died the day Evan Dando fell off the face of the earth, Bring on the Hate might seem like salvation. For the rest of us, Hoops is a bad imitation of the already lame Edwin McCain.
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