[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.
One Response
Thanks for spending some time on the review, and thanks for trying to come off like the caring older sister-who-knows-music-when-she-hears-it person, but sorry, you fall short in so many ways. Firstly, check out the cutesy dots of pretty colors mixed with hairs and airplanes here on your own site. A sort of Victorias Secret with a splash of Jean-Madeline flight school for fortysomethings. Secondly, it’s where’s black ben. where’s black ben.
Now the real stuff; You can’t write a review on the record without mentioning the banjo song. What a joke, right??? Check out the third verse, where Jeff sings “I got two skins on my brow”!!!!!! What the fuck?!?!? It’s like;”I’m a scarecrow. Listen to me get happy before I disappoint you with gibberish.” They say that it was written right then and there because the keyboard player cut his finger and wouldn’t come out of the bathroom for four or five hours!!These guys are a total mess, and I hear it’s because the bass player quit after a near mental breakdown from masturminding* the first two records, then playing babysitter to the roommate drummer, and then the rest of the idiots in the band.
Allow me to go deeper, please. Totally pos paas is so good, it makes me hate it! Unlistenable. All those hooks, and all those countless hours in the studio perfecting that great sound! Duh. TECHNO EYES RULZZZ!!! That shit is really funny, no?
Open with a cool raggae show, that is totally in sync with the first star wars.( recipe for total late teen, angel dust driven barf-fests or corny bullshit fueled raves in the scariest neighborhoods we could find. most of which ended with some totally hot, perfect-tittied goofball chick washing the blood off of your floor at 8;30 am.) Close it with Fred Durst playing David Lee Roth, in General Hospital.
Outer Space totally reminds me of that first doo-woppy stuff Sun Ra did in the fifties. Crappy vocals, and all. Whatever. I think they should’ve kept the whole eight minute version, with all the i m p r o v i s a t i o n. That track is totally disappointing.DOOSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Fortunately for need new body, I have been to montreal, and understand the seagull war song as a nod to the Canadian underground bands. Word. A tidbit of leaked info about peruvidia: there are vocals to it that poetically describe the struggle of an American woman whose fate it is to save the modern planet by jumping in a lake in Glastonbury, Scotland. She believes her name Isis, Liberty, and some other hippy dippy name all combined. Pretty light poetry.
Abstract dancers makes me want to hurl donkey jizz, and call it youthful, fresh, even perfect, not amateurish. The end.
* from the hip record reviewers dictionary of made up words, and no the bass player didn’t write the records, just the killer bass parts. Stay tuned…AL
alexhonkeylips@yahoo.com, December 15th, 2005 at 9:02 pm