Pet Shop Fashion is a really curious project. In all their digital outlets they refer to the music as ‘rough recordings’, the music on which has been the product of solo work by main person Todd Bridgeman. He’s doing it all – guitars, drums, lyrics, vocals, engineering. The result is a back catalog of five solid releases already, all of which not really taking themselves too seriously but done with a lot of care and love, and gravitating around alt rock, prog, pop rock, maybe with a slight touch of indie and punk.

However, in ‘Muzzled’, released digitally two weeks ago, Bridgeman is joined by an array of collaborators. All of them are credited in the track titles and judging by the fact each song features a different type of vocal performance we can do a not so wild guess and say each track on this record features a different vocalist.

Now, you can guess that making an 8-track record sound homogeneous while working with eight different individuals, especially the ones doing the vocals, which we can all agree are the main element listeners of pop and rock music cling to it’s a tough job. Todd Bridgeman definitely managed to pull this one off.

Just like previous Pet Shop Fashion records, ‘Muzzled’ does a lot of storytelling. Its songs follow different logic from each other and obviously tell a different part of the whole thing. While ‘Light Switch’ with Liel Bar-Z is a rock ballad, absolutely drown in melancholia with figurative and visual lyric-writing, ‘The Mansion Family’ (feat. Mella Barnes) is a mysterious rock banger that will remain in your head for a long time. Just like most of the music on the record this track is not following the usual, straight forward chorus-verse-chorus structure, which we’re all quite fed up with, instead, Bridgeman is working with more interesting musical forms and sparse, often unorthodox lyrics.

‘Muzzled’ is a free-form rock album, crammed with polar and obscure music ideas, curious lyrics, great musicianship and a very unique sense of mystery and humor. A great way to start the review year on Drooble and a super recommended listen!