The following is a list of Jeremy Winter and Pete Murphy's Top 10 All-Time Favorite Cereals:

01 Buc-Wheats (General Mills)
02 Grins, Smiles, Giggles & Laughs (Ralston)
03 Freakies (Ralston)
04 Boo Berry (General Mills)
05 Fruit Brute (General Mills)
06 Fruity Pebbles (Post)
07 Quisp (Quaker)
08 Blueberry Waffelos (Ralston)
09 Trix (70's formula; General Mills)
10 Body Buddies (brown sugar or fruit flavor; General Mills)

As you can see, these two fellas ate a lot of cereal in the 70's and 80's. Either that or they think that today's cereals just don't measure up to those of the past. What, Cheerios aren't seminal enough for them? What about the groundbreaking Cinnamon Toast Crunch? And where's the admittedly pretentious, but nonetheless poignant Life? But what really makes this misguided list so unusual is that songwriter Jeremy Winter (aka Jett Brando) and producer Pete Murphy submitted this list to CDNow in lieu of a Top 10 Albums of 2000. Hmm... Something tells me they've been eating more than just whole grain oats.

I heard The Movement Toward You before happening upon this list, so I can't say what assumptions one might make of Jett Brando's music based solely on his favorite cereals. Maybe you can help me. The strange obsession with fruits and sugar suggest saccharine pop music-- like something on Kindercore, maybe? But let's look closer. Buc-Wheats were brown and heavily coated, Fruit Brute had a werewolf on the box, and Boo Berry was downright ghoulish. Perhaps the record's darker, then, than we might imagine. But then what about Quisp, which featured a spaceman with a propeller hat, or the Ritalin kids on the cover of Body Buddies? The commercial for Freakies had creatures singing, "We are the Freakies, this is our Freakies Tree. We never miss a meal (oh no) 'cause we love our ce-re-eal." And we all know what Trix symbolizes.

So, while one might not necessarily make these assumptions, it's not difficult to find connections. And this album, a collection of recordings between October 1996 and December 1998, has a little of each type of cereal. The opening track, "The Center of Gravity (Sink Right Down)," most resembles the now-defunct All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors, which Winter once fronted. There are the standard shoegazer ingredients: slow guitar, spacy analog synthesizer, languid vocals, simple bass and cymbal-heavy percussion. But the modest production and Winter's overlapped voice, which occasionally jumps octaves while somehow remaining passive, lend to the song an eerie darkness often absent in this genre.

So, if the vertiginous opener is Buc Wheats-meets-Quisp, then the fuzzed-out "Waiting..." is Boo-Berry-- or rather, Boo Radleys-- without the Boo. Here, Winter takes his lo-fi shoegazing into slightly more rhythmic territory, but remains melancholy on the mic, thereby lulling the listener to sleep with lines like, "Come out, come out, wherever you are/ Coooooooome, ooooooooout." So the third track, "Well, Well," is sweet relief. The jangly guitar and glockenspiel are pure Blueberry Waffelos, but the harmonious high-pitched chorus definitely sprinkles on some Fruity Pebbles.

Despite a few more pretty, but unexceptional cereal-gazer numbers-- the MBV-esque "Athuna" and the closer, "Who is to Decide," a perfect Trix-y Spiritualized imitation-- Jett Brando throws out plenty of welcome surprises. The short "Love You Blues" offers a frantic, whir-driven verse and elated, clear-sky acoustic chorus-- a sonic representation of how it apparently feels to eat Body Buddies. The bluesy, Fruit Brute romp "Won't You Treat It Like a Storm" makes me wonder if I might like the Doors again after all these years. And "Dead Hot Sun" is all Grins, Smiles, Giggles & Laughs-- except for all those longing lyrics.

But even though The Movement Toward You offers all kinds of flavors, there remains an underlying consistency that can be attributed to Jeremy Winter's use of the same basic ingredients. And while you may often crave more, sometimes grain and sugar are all you need in the morning.

-Ryan Kearney