This just in.

My latest acquisition is a tough-to-find disc from 2001. It all started last Sunday with a post to the Audities group wondering what ever happened to a band named Cooler, who put out a disc in 2001 called Oh Happy Day. The poster raved about the disc, describing it as "crisp and clean and extremely catchy, with chunky guitars and big keyboards and the whole 9 yards". That was good enough for me, and I tracked down what apparently was the last copy on eBay for $5. After getting it yesterday, I have to concur.

Oh Happy Day can be described as "TSAR meets the Cars". In fact, the third track on the disc, "Party Time", is an undisguised homage to the Cars, complete with references to Cars song titles and such. I was kind of reticent about posting about this, however, since it appears that the disc is actually pretty hard to find, and I may have gotten lucky snagging the copy I did. There's apparently one copy available at GEMM, and some eBay seller in the UK seems to have one, but that's about it. Not Lame used to carry it, but apparently do no longer. And to compound matters, most traces of the band seem to have disappeared. The band's website, cooler4ever.com, is in 404-land, a page that once had downloads from the album is only available via Google cache (and the download links are dead), and most of the reviews and web pieces on the band and the album have suffered a similar fate.

So since it would be cruel of me to hype this band without giving anyone a way to hear it, I made a few mp3s and uploaded them to 4shared. If someone from Cooler gets wind of this and disapproves, I'll immediately take them down. But until then, this may be your only decent chance to hear them (click on the "download" button when the web page appears):

Girls' Night Out
Screw
Party Time

If you have any trouble downloading these, let me know in the comments. This is the first time I've tried one of these online file-hosting sites.