Written by: Eric Thompson

There’s a line from Hamlet: “…brevity is the soul of wit.” Quite true, even if it was spoken by the nimrod, Polonius. I’ve never heard an album that demonstrates this more than Tony Molina’s Dissed and Dismissed. There are twelve songs. The entire record clocks in at just over eleven minutes. And it’s all delicious.

Molina is a veteran of the San Francisco hardcore scene. But his recent solo efforts are much more on the garage rock / pop side, drawing a lot of Dinosaur Jr. and Smoking Popes type comparisons. The album that keeps popping into my head when I listen to Slumberland’s reissue of last year’s Dissed and Dismissed, though, is Weezer’s Pinkerton. I think it’s got more to do with the two records’ overall temperaments than with any musical similarities. There is a lot of unabashed heart ache here. The difference being that the longest song on Molina’s opus is only one minute thirty-one seconds long.

The first few songs on the album set the romantic angst mood with lots of pretty fuzz. Tracks like “Change My Ways” and “Tear Me Down” find Molina lamenting some entanglement or another. “No matter what I do / My thoughts go back to you.” Or, from “Tear Me Down:” “Hey, I was glad you’re the girl I found / But it seems you don’t want me around.” There are lots of distorted guitar melodies that go up and down the fret board. But you’re only going to hear those melodies once before the song is over. The tide starts to change on the drum-less “Nothing I Can Do.” The record’s fifth track is just two guitars and Molina’s voice. “I’ll never know what went wrong / Now I’m tryin’ to move on.” And it’s the second half of Dissed and Dismissed that makes it the pearl that it is. Molina even wedges a cover of Guided By Voices’ “Wondering Boy Poet” in there amongst all the distortion. It’s just him and an acoustic guitar “Flowing just like the day / Sailing just like the days.” Would that it was longer than three quarters of a minute.

I wanted to get Dissed and Dismissed reviewed in under four hundred words. I’m at three-seventy-two. So go buy it already.