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MUSIC REVIEWS archive reviews A-L | M-Z
The timing of this record could not be better. An unheralded New York no wave band is a hot commodity these days, even when the songs in question were recorded twenty years ago. Odds are, however, that if the Theoretical Girls had released more than one 7” back in its heyday, they would be about as well-known as Ut.
Not to sound cynical, I was actually as excited as anyone to hear these unreleased tracks penned by Jeffrey Lohn. The only TG material not included on this disc appear on Glenn Branca’s collection ‘77-’79 (Atavistic). The ownership issue is not as big a deal as the Tony Conrad/LaMonte YOung fiasco, and Acute's next release is Branca's Ascension.
That might be because Theoretical Girls were a work in progress.
It’s arguable whether their influence factored into the churning art core of Mission of Burma, or if Lohn’s disaffected deadpan vocals were copped by Thurston Moore, but if you dig that style you'll enjoy their take on it.
Wharton Tiers’ insistent toms and Margaret Dewys’ jabbing keyboard add to the fray on songs like “Computer Dating” or “Chicita Bonita,” and you get a sense of that flawed moment in a way that the retro-movement cannot rekindle.
(gc) Bottleskup Flenkenkenmike -
Looks Like Velvet, Smells Like Pee (Broklyn Beats)
This is a project that lets you know it's a goof - there's the album art itself, drenched in pop cult irony (a splayed Darth Vader, commands to defeat your inner Robocop) and song titles like "canada post-rock machine gullible sucker," a Godspeed You Black Emperor! remix perpetrated by GYBE's drummer.
How played-out is the caricature of trenchcoat mafia anti-authority punker-than-thou beat dispenser?
Is the only antidote to pretension making pee pee jokes? Or do the two go hand in hand?
The anarcho-conspiracy aesthetics of GYBE and 1-speed bike come together with Aidan Girt's snotty experiment as Bottleskup Flenkenkenmike.
Fans of 1-Speed Bike will be pleased with this take on dancefloor beats and sampled non sequiturs.
"Bronze Medal for Fence Hopping at the Punk Olympics" is the abstract closer; drums gallop and grinding tape organs spill out calliope gut spools, then an Entertainment Tonight riff plays as an anti-consumerist, take-it-to-the-streets rant is delivered through headphones.
It's confused, paranoid, and messy, but so are we. Girt's liner note scrawls offer better advice than I can - "Let's leave cynicism in the last century. Stop buying records and start buying land."
(gc) A Frames (SS / Dragnet)
Pleasant surprises abound from A Frames, although they mostly remind me of other bands I miss. This CD is a deadpan collision of chunky soup-fork guitars (a la Lake of Dracula, Monitor Batts) snotty/bored vocals (This Robot Kills, Chris Thompson) and the occasional splatter freak out.
It's getting to the point that singing simplistic, silly Kraftwerk monotone poems about being a "Nobot" or having a doo-wop ballad, acoustic guitar and all, about a surveillance camera ("Surveillance") has been done - it's just happens to work for them 75% of the time.
The band also reminds me of the late great Sacto-unit Karate Party with some chill-pills and girl vocals.
More songs about plastic surgery and brains in freezers make me think of the Cramps gone all Skin Graft-y. Despite all the name drops and droops, A Frames get me good and stoked over the state of post-whatever-you-want-to-call-it stuff - when the masks are torn off and songs, rudimentary as they are, replace the spazz-out rite.
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Theoretical Girls - Theoretical Record (