Heard Here

Reagan’s Polyp
Love Overdrive: Unpopular Favorites 1992-2002

Reagan's Polyp insists that they are not a joke. They swear. That said, they can't seem to keep a straight face either. On their monstrous greatest hits album, Love Overdrive: Unpopular Favorites 1992-2002, the Arkansas duo set out to encapsulate the 10 years of wild and terrible musical schizophrenia, Frank Zappa-style commentary and unspeakable socio-sexual frustration that it took them no less than 25 studio albums to unleash on the world. Be afraid. But be patient, too.
There is absolutely nothing redeemable about Love Overdrive from a pop standpoint. Nothing at all. The lead singers have weird voices, there are no catchy melodies and very few songs adhere to the same style for more than a minute at a time. Some don't even have a style at all. Except for the two “Classic Rock Moments,” live cuts of the band playing a few bars of classic hits like the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” or Led Zeppelin's “Immigrant Song” and then descending into hellish screaming and guitar cacophony, there is no sense of pop sensibility on this album at all. Reagan’s Polyp seem to take most of their musical cues from Frank Zappa, the Dust Brothers, and various types of ’70s era cock metal, when they do keep things straight, but they willingly allow anything else into the mix. There's smooth jazz jamming, there’s funk, there’s electronica, there's even beatboxing. On “Our Next Album Concentrate,” perhaps the most musically interesting track of the whopping 52 on the double CD, several musical styles are trotted out, then immediately liquefied and beaten to death just as soon as a style or vibe comes into being. It is takes a lot to tolerate such frustrated musical writhing, especially 150 minutes of it, but the saving grace of almost every song (though some are beyond redemption of any kind) is the lyrics. The lyrics are also testaments to the ungodly frustration that Reagan’s Polyp feel toward their age and their time, but for those of us who have no patience for that, they’re also rife with dick and fart jokes. Tracks like “You Smell Bad” and “You Think It's Funny” — which include lines like, “Your face like a turd so hot!” — are tough to handle in many ways, but it's all so unabashed that it comes off as self-indulgent catharsis of childish urges rather than someone who's trying to be funny, especially when you acknowledge the dark sexual undertone that accompanies most of the tracks.
There are tracks that go a little darker, such as “Functional Reptile Slammy,” which offers the amusing and strange “I am tempted to sink into the hairy disaster of your body,” as an opening line, but then descends into violent metallic orgy with lyrics like: “I am tied to the preachers face/ Take a shower with Granpappy in a pink wash of desire/ Humiliate me! Humiliate me! Humiliate me!”
However, when Reagan’s Polyp aren’t flogging the bishop, or screaming about it, they choose to attack society instead. “Erotic Dream of Red Chamber,” “Rich and Horny,” “MMM, Thank You” and “The Abbatoir of Sin” are all raw and weird in a way that prompts both giggles and grimaces all at once. “You may not realize it, but we're trying to teach you something about your status as an audience,” lead singer Astronaut Body quips on “MMM, Thank You.” It's at that point that it becomes clear that this is the most subtle, and most clever “fuck you” on the whole record (and there are many, many, many more obvious ones on the record). Reagan's Polyp are not a joke. But they are not doing this for you. If you can hang in and endure their perversions and wild, devious flights, they might become your new favorite cult heroes. If not, they don”t care. You won't be the first to recoil in terror. And you definitely won't be the last either.

—Max Willens

Gogol Bordello
Multi Contra Culti

In terms of concept this album is off the scale, a 100 out of a possible 4. It combines the party theatrics of Oingo Boingo with the drunk energy of The Pogues and the Eastern European ethnic parody of… well, nobody else. The CD insert is filled with pictures of clowns, jugglers and a crazy-eyed, mustached lead singer lying on the floor screaming into the microphone. Their live show is probably out of control. The lyrics are a hilarious mix of unintelligible Eastern Bloc rants, broken English and nutty social commentary. On “Punk Rock Parranda,” lead vocalist Eugene Hutz sings genius lines like, “If the president doesn’t play the sax/ He will not get an undertable treatment,” and on “Huliganjetta” lines like “And once I will be over border/ I will send you pretty postcard/ With three heartfelt clichés,” give one the sense that the band is eschewing English satirically rather than being unable to speak it, which is pretty novel.
The accordion, saxophone and violin add the right amount of manic ethnic flavor, but on the rock side of things there’s just something not quite as great as the rest of the album, which is made a little more disappointing given the conceptual genius of the rest of the album. Barely taking yourself seriously is usually the mark of a great band, so it’s not too hard to forgive Gogol Bordello for the limpness of their rock sound. The accordion is loud enough to make up for it.

—Derek Schleelein

The Funeral
Pathetic Me

Pathetic Me, the new album by Icelandic band The Funerals is a punk side project’s foray into the sparse and sublime. Now here’s the irony: it’s a completely honest country album out of Iceland done with absolutely no irony whatsoever, and it’s damn good to boot. After writing two love and lost songs for his girlfriend, singer Ragnar Kjartansson formed the aptly named Funerals to perform his dirge-like balads with Icelandic musicians pilfered from the bands Kanada and Trabant, including the haunting backup vocals of Lara Sveinsdottir. Over two weeks and into four channels in a cabin in the wilds of Iceland they wrote and recorded all 14 tracks of Pathetic Me.
Like its recent American counterpart, Beck’s Sea Change, it was recorded live and bears that too-brilliant-to-be-produced feel. And while it does have the occasional atmospheric white noise, unlike Sea Change it doesn’t have producer Nigel Godrich’s (of Radiohead OK Computer fame) space age studio craft. It also doesn’t have Beck’s history for the absurd, and Pathetic Me feels a lot more honest because of it. The first song, “Puppy Eyes,” is a battle between Kjartansson’s vocals and the unsteady rhythm of the simple brushed. Lyrically it would seem that it was a simple love song, but in the aching quiver of Kjartansson’s voice one gets the feeling that this is a love no longer requited.
Pathetic Me, the title track, begins with “High on the couch touching myself/ Ain’t nothing like a bottle of beer/ holy smoke my Jesus and fire/ Where are you now my sweet messiah?” Kjartansson does a nice job of painting a humanized portrait of himself to the point where the listener can not only hear the pain in his voice, but also know it comes from somewhere real. His power is not in his range of pitch, but in the range of inflection he can effortlessly seed in his lyrics.
Later in “Saturday Friend,” this pain is built into a haunting crescendo of Kurt Cobain-esque mantra. Another one of Pathetic Me’s subtle joys is the supporting cast of characters. The smooth harmonies of Sveinsdottir in “Mom” weave in and out of Kjartansson’s sad memories of his teenage years, and do their best to soften Kjartansson’s pain with a motherly calm. In the song “Teenagers,” Sveinsdottir’s jazz-like scat proves to be the song’s best attribute, and in the “Greatest Bar on Earth” the Johnny Cash meets Stephen Merritt baritone vocals allow for a refreshing break from the Kjartansson whimper.
The album’s 14 tracks do drag on a bit. It’s unclear whether the humorless somber tone of the Funerals needed to be applied to songs like “Teenager” and “Magazine,” and the message is taken a little over the top by the final track’s affirmation of the “power of pathetic.” What makes this album work is that The Funerals were not trying to make an American country album. Pathetic Me stays true to its Icelandic spirit, making references to the dark mornings and using the synth-hooks that are seemingly omnipresent in Icelandic pop interspersed with the more standard country sounds of the guitar bass and drums. It’s a country album filled with all the appropriate pathos, but it’s also influenced by indie-rock and the odd blip of tremolo guitar. Pathetic Me is clearly of a time and place, but also has the universal lasting power to make sense to any audience.

—Harry Gassel