This came out in 2004 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Songwriters often say that before you can come up with good tunes, you have to get all the bad ones our of your system.
If that’s true, Ian Smith obviously went through his amateurish stage quite a while back. As the chief songwriter, vocalist and guitarist with Kitchener popsters The Miniatures, the prolific Smith is also the latest in a line of ridiculously gifted Canuck tunesmiths to emerge in the past couple of years. On his band’s solidly satisfying sophomore CD Coma Kid, the 20-something tunesmith’s songcraft deftly combines the crunching melodicism of power pop with the sensual decadence of glam and the rhythmic rigidity of ’80s new wave, producing an addictive, fat-free concoction over which he lazily pours his languorous, seductively raspy vocals. The result is an impressive disc that stylistically spans Marc Bolan and David Bowie, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Todd Rundgren and Sparks, The Cars and Weezer — all without sounding slavishly derivative. If that isn’t the mark of a great songwriter, we don’t know what is.
