Need New Body
UFO
File 13
I wonder if any of the critics who raved about this album last year have listened to it recently and blushed with shame. UFO is nowhere near worth the hype that was heaped on it. It doesn’t reinvent dance music or redefine enthusiasm. It just exists alongside the other scatter-brained, intentionally eclectic bands like Detachment Kit and Plastic Mastery, coming off like the heavily amphetamined progeny of Beck’s genre hopping back catalog.
With twenty-three songs and forty plus minutes to wade through, there’s an awful lot of dissonant filler and outright garbage to make this album anything close to brilliant. The asinine beatboxing of “Turken Hogan” is unbelievably stupid and raises serious questions about a possible reverse pretension in the rock crit world wherein the standards of quality are dropped so low that crap actually becomes “high art.” The second offender is the abrasive, in-your-face happy ascending riff on “Beach.” Rounding out the trash trio is the free association falsetto vocals of “Red as a Bone,” which isn’t nearly clever enough to sustain its four-minute length.
The album does have its fair share of bright moments, though. The menacing synth growls that steer “I Know” and “Shark Attack” through various levels of dementia are fun, as is the bubbling, bass heavy circular drone of “Popfest.” The disc’s topper is “Show Me Your Heart,” which comes off like Faith No More trying to write an electronic hoe-down for kids but inadvertently turning it all nightmarish by adding colorful dissection lyrics overtop.
Unfortunately, none of these songs last long before being displaced by the album’s ever shifting paradigm, dragging them down in a wave of spastic energy and genre shifting, but very little substance.
Need New Body: http://www.neednewbody.com/ • File 13 Records: http://www.file-13.com/
