This week's feature: Two Hours Traffic

Two Hours Traffic, Little Jabs (Bumstead)

WHO

Charlottetown quartet who get a little help from Joel Plaskett on their second full-length.

DISCOGRAPHY

The April Storm (Self-released, 2003)
Two Hours Traffic (Maple Music, 2005)
Isolator (Maple Music, 2006)
Little Jabs (Bumstead, 2007)

IN A NUTSHELL

Little Jabs is one of the catchiest, most perfect summer albums ever made.

THE STORY

I'm generally not a fan of East Coast pop-rock. I can't say I like Joel Plaskett all that much ("Nowhere With You" excepted). I have very little time for Sloan. Wintersleep and In-Flight Safety and Matt Mays and all those other bands from the Maritimes pretty much bleed together, as far as I'm concerned. Yet in spite of all that, I have to confess: I absolutely love Little Jabs, the second full-length from Charlottetown's Two Hours Traffic.

I know I've said all this before. But it bears repeating because of the fact that I've been listening to it almost non-stop for the last month. I usually spend a day or two listening to new albums before I move on to something else. But with Two Hours Traffic, I've been subsisting on a near-constant musical diet of songs like "Backseat Sweetheart" and "Heatseeker" and "Stuck For The Summer". They're all just that good.

It helps, of course, that the songs match the season perfectly. Little Jabs is an ideal summer album, with track after track of sunny, upbeat pop. Even when they slow things down a little bit (as on "Stolen Earrings"), it's still absurdly catchy, the kind of stuff for which the term "summer anthem" was invented. It's as if Plaskett -- who produced this album -- decided to take the spirit of "Nowhere With You" and infuse it into every track here (rather than saving some of that for himself.

Beyond that, there's not much else to say about Little Jabs. Clearly, if Two Hours Traffic can even win over someone who basically hates this kind of music (that is, me), that says something about the quality on display here. There may be something that prevents them from using this album as a means of taking over the world, but I can't imagine what it might be.