The Capricorns - In the Zone
It's another review I posted on RYM originally! One of my friends recently described this album as feeling "extremely 'we just want to make some music'," which is a way better summation of what I love best about it than anything I wrote here. But y'all can decide that for yourselves.
It's a pretty simple formula: two girls who share vocal duties, play Casio keyboards, and use what I'm pretty sure are pre-programmed beats. Hardly earth-shattering stuff. But the simplicity of their whole setup plays to their advantage; the less there is going on, the more you focus on what is there. And what is there is basically purpose-built to be your next earworm.
It's hard for me to talk about their singing without comparing it to Sleater-Kinney. They're not as good of singers, of course, but some of the phrasing wouldn't be out of place on something like Dig Me Out. And, far from what you'd expect, the Casio keyboard sound is surprisingly versatile; the swirling up-tempo playing on "The New Sound" and the repetitive staccato riff on "The Longest Drive", to name two, are equally effective (the latter's got an interesting thing going on where if you listen to the percussion, it's fast, but if you listen to Heather's vocals, it's slow, which really fits with the grief expressed in the lyrics imo).
But the thing that appeals to me most about this album, and I've mentioned this in a review for a different early 00s obscurity, is that it sits in a weird timeframe where I can think both "I am rediscovering this incredible lost album from 20 years ago" and "I was alive when this was released, it's recent enough that I can feel like it's almost contemporary to me," which is the perfect spot for slightly obsessive fandom. It's not an emotionally important album for me, it's just a great collection of songs (that I really want everyone I know to listen to), but at the same time, if I were 10 years older, I'm sure this album would have been very important for hypothetical early-00s teenage me.