When My Baby Smiles at Me, I Go to Rio

In the two years that have passed since the Furtips 2nd album Le Louping, the Dutch band has taken it upon themselves to up the ante in both the recording quality department and in the songwriting dept., coming up with their magnum opus, When My Baby Smiles at Me, I Go to Rio, their second Animal World CD. This album finds the band rising above the lo-fi/ home taping scene it arose from and coming closer to joining the ranks of quirky American bands like Grandaddy, Home or the Starlight Mints. However, the Furtips still bear a resemblence to the Television Personalities (especially in the vocal dept.) and the Swell Maps, they even added some tinkering piano interludes this time around. There is also a hint of New Zealand/Australian flavor coloring this album (think Tall Dwarfs/Chris Knox, Alastair Galbraith, the Cannanes), however the band stands alone as its own entity, each song could be picked out of a line-up as having that distinctive Furtips sound.