[review 2005: the disappointments]

Oh, Need New Body. If you could only get your collective shit together, you’d have an outstanding album on your hands. But then you wouldn’t be Need New Body, would you?

Take a look at the Need New Body website and you’ll start to understand the problem with Who’s Black Ben? It’s willfully obtuse and amateurish, mostly uninformative and offputting to all but the most dedicated (or determined) of readers. The album is the same way; you can see the potential on tracks like “Brite Tha’ Day” and “So St Rx,” but in order to get to it you have to wade through some pretty strange shit. And while the obvious wankery is occasionally interesting (take the choral section of “Outerspace”), it’s also wilfully obtuse and amateurish. Let’s take “Outerspace” as an example: you can tell someone went to a lot of trouble to arrange everything just so, and yet the end product sounds like a drunken glee club meeting. Which I imagine was the point.

Some tracks are strange (”Magic Kingdom”), while others sound more like a giant fuck you (”Inner Gift”). Then there’s the obviously stupid and unlistenable (the aptly-titled “Mouthbreather”). What grates so much is not just the fact that so much of the album is the musical equivalent of masturbating a donkey onto a canvas and calling it art; it’s that you can’t quite ignore Need New Body because they’ve shown that they do, indeed, have the skills to write some decent pop songs. Take, for instance, “Eskimo,” a delightfully wonky keyboard track that finishes off the album. Or “Beach,” from the band’s last album. And it’s not that Need New Body just can’t write enough good songs, either; I get the distinct feeling that their albums are so horribly bad at times because that’s exactly what they want. They want to write songs that are unlistenable, or nonsensical, or a minute of instrumental noise. In other words, they’re writing stupid songs on purpose.

Well, congrats, boys. Mission accomplished.