"Tap, tap" go the drums. "Strum, strum" go the guitars. "Coo, coo" go the vocals. "Yawn, yawn" goes the audience. The notorious Brent DiCrescenzo had this to say about Slumber Party when we saw them perform at this year's South by Southwest music festival: "If they replaced everyone in the Velvet Underground with clones of Nico..." That's pretty much all you need to know about them. It's just a shame they didn't play their set in pajamas.

Granted, it's hard to find fault with this sort of primitive, woozy, jangly pop; everyone needs at least one album of this kind of thing in their collections. But that one album might as well be by Mazzy Star or Galaxie 500 or even, yes, The Velvet Underground and Nico.

Slumber Party merely reshuffles the basic formula-- passive-aggressively hazy production, vague vocal harmonizing, aimless guitar leads, titles like "Strawberry Sunday" and "Ten Little Pills"-- without adding anything unique to the mix. Look! "Certain Versions" actually has some (muted) guitar fuzz and the drummer puts her toms to good use! "I'm an Example" has a nice keyboard bit and a drum machine! When you get excited over such tiny differences between songs, you know you're trying too hard to find something worthwhile about an album.

I'll stop short of saying outright that Slumber Party are boring, but come now, girls, what happened to all the giggling about boys, the games of "truth or dare," the pillow fights? Since when has sleeping ever been the point of slumber parties?

-Nick Mirov