music reviews

The Black Lips – Live in Seattle

| Michael Gilbert

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Crocodile Cafe
Seattle, WA
January 19th, 2007

I am relatively certain that the black lips will one day be famous, snorting conspicuous quantities of cocaine off some ecstatic groupie’s ass while everyone from Ira Glass to Lou Barlow congratulate them on their stunning performance at the most recent Grammy awards show. I say this not necessarily because it will happen, or even that the Black Lips think it will happen, but when you have a man who can repeatedly spit four feet in the air and without fail, catch it back in his mouth – well, there’s something about that action that makes me feel like my entire body is suspended in a pool of grandma’s warm oatmeal. I just feel safe despite my fear, and raisins, and my fear of raisins. But grandma was awesome.

Not A Problem mp3
The Black Lips on MySpace

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New Young Pony Club EP [Modular Interscope]

| Mary Mulholland

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Rating: 7.0

In the same spirit as Brazil’s CCS, British indie-electronic quintet New Young Pony Club is silly, irresistible fun. The clipped guitar chords, synth melodies and irresistible beats of their single “Ice Cream” demand booty shaking as much as its goofy, sexual metaphors (“drink me like a licker, come and dip your dipper”) make for the perfect, sassy sing-along. It’s no wonder the single sold out in the UK in three days and is no doubt destined for the sweaty, after-midnight throb of many nights to come. Their self-titled EP even includes the video for “Ice Cream”, in which the band’s three female members bop coyly atop a giant globe of rainbow-colored licorice (“I can make you ice cream, we can be a sweet team”), cat-sized dollops of whipped cream form a carousel around the drummer, and mounds of pink cotton candy loom behind stoic, mustachioed boys on bass and guitar.

New Young Pony Club Video and EP Stream

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Menomena Friend and Foe [Barsuk]

| William Cremin

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Rating: 7.0

After listening to Friend and Foe several times, you may still find yourself pondering exactly what to think of it. Perhaps you’ll consider your admiration for the experimental streak that the gentlemen of Menomena exhibit. Perhaps you’ll express some reservations about their kitchen sink approach to instrumentation and arrangement. Perhaps, after some time, you’ll come to accept the disorienting songwriting technique and the quirky, scattershot charm that it aspires to. It wouldn’t be an unreasonable sequence of reactions.

Stream Friend and Foe on Barsuk
Wet and Rusting mp3

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SJ Esau Wrong Faced Cat Feed Collapse [Anticon]

| Matthew Wendus

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Rating: 5.5

Music’s future is in the independent label scene, and it is likely that talent will be culled increasingly from the fertile fields of Myspace Music. But there comes a point when a critic who reviews predominantly Indie releases begins to wonder, “is there such a thing as being TOO Indie?” Is there a line in the sand over which lies a dangerous realm of lo-fi, ‘I cut this album on my laptop’ music containing so much ambient sampling, white boy pretentiousness, and overdrive-free rock as to be embarrassing? The answer is yes, and I’m damn sick of it.

Cat Track (he has no balls) mp3

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The Best Bands Found on MySpace

| Michael Gilbert

As many of you have noticed, Myspace™ is now home to legions of bands, teens, artists, children, predators searching for children, children posing as adults for the period of time it takes them to close their fingers around quiet places, adults posing as teens and pre-teens in order to fulfill a desire to be treated once again like a child or at least to not have to live up to the lofty standards of adulthood, and all the rest within the amorphous group that makes up the unwashed masses. For this brief moment, though, we will focus on the bands. What follows is a selection of music found on Myspace – some bands are new to me, others have been found only in passing, and yet others remain noteworthy simply because they are about zombies. Zombies that eat brains.

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R.E.M. And I Feel Fine… The Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982-1987 [Capitol/I.R.S.]

| Chad Headrub

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Unrated

Whoa. Dude. R.E.M. is back. It’s been the trend the last few albums to hark the return of the band as a creative unit at the height of their powers, only so they can be dismissed in a month or so, until the college kids in our flying-car breakfast-machine future deem “Up” and “Reveal” masterpieces once again. We needn’t wait to praise this one.

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