Ear Pwr
Super Animal Brothers III
Car Park
A precocious boy and a precocious girl rig up their own synths and presto! – instant eternal dance party! Sounds like just the sort of thing I’d hate, right? Dunno, man, maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, but I just find Ear Pwr’s debut, Super Animal Brothers III, fucking charming. It’s like they’ve perfected the dayglo lazertag hedonism that Dan Deacon pushes into annoying overkill and delivered the eight-bit video game sugar fix that Crystal Castles promised, thankfully without the ultra-predictable boho nihilist poses. So I fucking like it: two kids with crazy hair spazzing out over DIY rhythms and blippy synth tones that are meticulously AND instinctively layered and constructed – that sound accidental and haphazard and incredibly clued in all at once – informed by a very savvy pop culture.
Absorbed, reconstructed, and regurgitated within the sixteen songs on Super Animal Brothers III is hip hop, rave, Hi-NRG, anarcho-punk rock, cartoon music, British post-punk, new wave, Konami theme songs and square dancing music. And Sarah Reynolds’ vocals are pitch perfect for this candy kaleidoscope – a high-pitched hyperspeed yelp here, or a mechanoid teenage girl Ralf Hutter there, without being all ridiculously over the top.
The tracks rush by in an adrenalized blurt, most tracks clock in under three minutes. No track overstays its welcome. Well, several do. There’s this one about a sparkly sweater or somesuch that almost drove me insane the way Girl Talk drives me insane – like the Keebler elves are dancing on my skull with jackhammer platform boots. So yeah, I mean, sometimes you’re like FUCK, lay off the chocolate frosted sugar bombs already! And just when I’ve decided, that’s it, I’m taking this CD out, I’m sick of it, it’s already rushed on to the next track and it’s just so endearingly fucking freaked out! And there’s some underlying darkness there, too. On one track, Reynolds is chanting, “drink the glitter” over and over again in this Village of the Damned voice and it’s just like the Dashers brainwashing Divine in Female Trouble. I can’t see them playing these songs in five or ten years – but did they have fun at this moment? Yes, yes, they did. This is not a big statement. This is an ecstatic doodle.
Car Park: http://www.carparkrecords.com
