Moron Parade
Dark Nights: Knife City
ParadeCo Records
I give this band points for the name alone. Moron Parade combines a self-released, lo-fi sound with a penchant for colons in their album titles, and comes up with a nice but unremarkable product. Guitar and bass are clanky and fuzzy, respectively, and the drummer keeps things moving along. But I just can’t click into the songs. “Big Thruster” comes the closest, but it’s a bit atypical, with a complex lyric sung or chanted by the band, pointing out that you wouldn’t like it if I came to your house and hid stuff without telling you. More typical is the opaque “Grabstick Girl,” with its laid back vocals, and “Chinos Radio,” beginning with a quiet guitar intro, then inexplicably stepping up to a fuzzed out feedback tirade of noise.
It’s not clear from the insert who in the band plays which instrument, but they do it well enough. Overall, the sound is thin (well, that’s low fidelity, of course), the lyrics are a bit obscure and no danger of a hook lurks here. Moron Parade is sound best appreciated on late night radio, and even then you need to be in the right mood.
ParadeCo Records: http://www.paradeco.com • Moron Parade: http://www.moronparade.com
