“You’ve got your words of wisdom, and i’ve got a few chords to play. We should borrow a microphone and put it all down in tape.”Less than a minute in and the modus operandi of Her Space Holiday’s Marc Bianchi is revealed. He later goes on to say “if they tell us that were doing it wrong we will just turn up the sound, turn up the sound of our songs”. A noble statement indeed. A sort of celebration of friends making it up as they go along, having fun and dancing the night away. It’s a rollicking start, and quite a departure from Bianchi’s previous HSH outings. Abandoning his computer and introspection and taking on a live band complete with banjo and handclaps and lalala-ing a plenty. This is slanted pop with folksy undertones writ large; a jangle here, a twang there, boy meets girl, ball falls out with girl, boy get back with girl...repeat to fade. While there is an almost child like innocence here lyrically Bianchi occasionally gives away his emo roots- a little to much schmaltz about photographing smiles, or sitting with bowls of hope. Take single ‘Sleepy Tigers’ for example, which begins with jingling bells and handclaps:“Well I like you/ so very much/ so much in fact i gotta wake you up/ it’s not that I have words to speak/ I just wanna see you looking at me”While XOXO, Panda and the New Kid Revival is a pleasant enough record, there is a definite Jam band,unpolished feel here. It certainly sounds like they had a lot of fun making it but after a while Bianchi’s rather nasal vocal begins to wear thin, and, at 14 songs there are at least 3 or four tracks here that could have been cut to give a more focused record. If you put a track on your album called ‘No More Good Ideas’ with a chorus that chants “There are no more good ideas in me” replete with organ stabs and (yet more) hand claps you are asking for trouble. As it is, the track is one of the highlights but does serve as a marking point after which the ideas and variation do seem to dry up somewhat. In fact by the end of the record melodies seem to blend into one, offering new arrangements of a single idea rather than any true variation. There is a hollowness to the sentiments on show too, as if Bianchi has fallen into producing for a target market (that market being Smallville fans and Deathcab die hards). In an already over saturated field XOXO... has very little to offer other than naive melodies and cliched adolescent reminiscences.I can only assume that the volume in the Her Space Holiday camp just got turned up. 51%Her Space Holiday on Myspace