The Dead Bodies
Mr. Spookhouse’s Pink House
Quite Scientific
With eclecticism and eccentricity becoming more standard issue in today’s indie pop scene, having an album that’s “weird” isn’t nearly as special as it used to be. To be sure, Detroit’s The Dead Bodies fall outside the realm of straightforward songwriters, but Mr. Spookhouse’s Pink House cuts such a huge swath through nearly 40 years’ worth of musical history that the mashed-up offspring of disparate genres still ends up being an absurdly compelling pop album.
While there are a number of what-the-fuck moments – the demonic chipmunk voice that gives way to faux English accents on “Pink Muff Dance Party Vampire Resolve” being an excellent example of this – the album is much easier to get immersed in than are many of the band’s contemporaries’. The Bodies blur the line between organic and inorganic so well that when taking the album as a whole, the shift is nearly imperceptible from the wistful Boards of Canada-inspired electronic introductory tracks to the guitar-based lyric songs that close out the disc. The transition is undoubtedly assisted by a dizzying array of asides in orchestral music (“Interlude”), Neil-Diamond-via-Joy-Division (“Voices From Above”) and prime Bowie/T. Rex glam (“In Heaven, We Are”), among others. Moreso than any other release that’s come across my review pile recently, this album genuinely has something for everyone and even goes so far as to invent sub-genres to convert the less easily convinced, which is certainly a more inclusive approach to making strange music than your average egocentric eccentric.
Quite Scientific Records: http://www.quitescientific.com
