On their best behavior, cats are unsmiling creatures. Cheshire variety and the rare, extraordinarily cuddly, probably retarded types aside, cats in general have the uncanny and unnerving ability to live most of their lives just playing it cool. When they're not perfecting the process of solidarity and apathy, they're being, well, catty.

I mention this for a couple of reasons. One is that Kitty Craft's Pamela Valfer is considerably cat-like in her musical m.o.: though a few guest musicians pop in to provide basslines, her second full-length, Catskills, is Valfer's solo gig; the platform to push buttons on drum machines, lightly strum the guitar, and play soft keyboard melodies is hers and hers alone. But the appearance of two cat-related puns on an album cover is just too much fodder for music critics. I'm only human; I had to snap it up.

Really, Valfer is most feline when it comes to her vocal chops. Unexpressive, yet irritating, Valfer's nasal warble is an overdubbed, echoing fog. She approaches the beginning of each line with a high-pitched, jarring intonation only to trail off, mid-lyric, into a top-register drone. This only makes her already bad voice sound worse, like some homely lass taking a painter's approach to make-up.

Though Janis Ian and Joni Mitchell are listed as influences, you'd never know it, especially since Valfer's monotonous vocals obscure most of the lyrical content. If she's going for deeply personal introspection, it's totally lost in the impenetrable murmur. Take, for instance, the chorus of "Silver Lining," which sounds something like, "Memory, mo, mo, it's time." But Valfer's comprehensible lyrics are often equally inane; "Comeback Queen" showcases gems like, "Everyone knows/ That's the way it goes/ 'Cause that much is true." She can't win!

And then there's the "hip-hop" with which Valfer and her mixing cohort, the Pulsars' Dave Trumfio, dabble. It's disgraceful! It's gross! And at times, as on the breezy PM Dawn wimp-hop of "Comeback Queen," it achieves full-on monstrosity status. The idea here seems to be a stab at "hehehe" irony, with a white girl in her bedroom singing songs into her PC's microphone and layering hip-hop beats under them. It's supposed to be, at the very least, music to smirk to. The problem is, it's so unfunny as to actually provoke tears. After all, neither of these two kids are Teddy Riley, and the incessant twee bullshit isn't cute.

Beyond all this, what bogs down Catskills is that it's minimal to a fault. There's such a distinct lack of variation in melody and structure that each of these tracks lazily lapse into the next, which, in turn, magnifies truly abysmal tracks like "Top of the Key," a two-minute, forty second course in Extreme Casio. I'm not asking for glitz here; Valfer can keep the affinity for her eight-track. Slight deviation is what I'm after. Just something minor. An unlikely bassline, maybe, or a keyboard hook that isn't a near-verbatim replication of the one from the previous song. Never happens, though.

The music of Kitty Craft is hip-hop like J. Lo is "street." In short, Will Smith could do better.

-Richard M. Juzwiak