"Camp Hill Radio Operator" opens this disc with a snippet of backwards tape, a shuddering and compressed guitar lead over a pulsing beat, then a burst of brilliant, cascading quarter-note triplet vocal harmonies: Cotton Mather own up immediately to their influences, the Beatles, Byrds, Big Star, and Beach Boys. Unlike so many other bands with similar, equally apparent influences, Cotton Mather look to these sources not as templates for stamping out cheap knockoffs but as models of musical procedure. Like the best work of those artists, Kon Tiki is crammed full of musical detail, its every surface richly modeled, its every sound reflective of the sheer joy of sonic invention. Cotton Mather recognize, too, that texture in itself is not enough, that over time its pleasures become worn smooth and dull unless molded into forms with their own integrity. Every song here does what pop songs are supposed to do by sounding simultaneously fresh and instantly familiar. The band also avoids the mistake, all too common among guitar pop bands, of assuming that the musical clock stopped immediately after the recording of Big Star's Radio City. Some of Pavement's offhand, clumsy grace, Guided by Voices' gnomic fragments, and the Loud Family's obscure sonic wit decorate moments of this disc; while your average guitar-pop band would deliver a Beach Boys tribute with a song entitled "Church of Wilson," Cotton Mather brings an offering for the altar of Black Francis. None of Cotton Mather's influences are terribly unusual - but that fact only proves that originality isn't really a primary virtue of brilliant pop music.

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