July 11 - July 18, 1 9 9 6
[Music Reviews]

Bald bears and honey

Six new discs from Merge

Lambchop, Hank. For a 10-piece band who boast one guy playing "open-end wrenches," Nashville's Lambchop really don't make a lot of noise on this seven-track EP. That's due in part to the fact that weepy lap steel, understated baritone sax, and chiming glockenspiel figure heavily in the Lambchop mix. It's also the inevitable result of mixing the moodiness of Berlin-era Lou Reeds with the elements borrowed from the chamber country music Chet Atkins pioneered in the early '60s. Like Sparklehorse, another great eccentric Southern band whom Lambchop share some secrets with, it makes a lot more sense on disc than on paper.

Verbena, Pilot Park. This young Alabama foursome aren't afraid to wear a few prominent influences on their sleeves on their debut EP. Pilot Park opens with "I Say So," a song that would be a great Feelies cover if only the Feelies had written it. As it stands, it's a tribute to the Feelies and to anyone who ever copped the riff from the Velvets' "Foggy Notion." There's some Big Star tragic pop in "Silver Queen" (which features some nice sweet-and-sour girl/boy harmonies), a little of the Stones' sloppy swagger in a track titled "***** ****," and some more Velvets strumming and droning in "Pony Express."

The Mad Scene, Chinese Honey. Twisted lo-fi pop with a surreal edge (à la Robyn Hitchcock) is what New Zealand's Hamish Kilgour specializes in because he used to be in the Clean. But his American wife, Lisa Siegel, wasn't in the Clean, so she's free to write pleasant little Beatlesque ditties. Usually you get a 50/50 mix on a Mad Scene disc, but this time there's a bonus -- an awesome cover of Echo & the Bunnymen's "Pictures on My Wall."

The Cakekitchen, Bald Old Bear. There's something chillingly gorgeous about Graeme Jefferies's white-noise guitar bursts and the way they complement the poetry of his lyrics. This EP features a live version (just drums and electric guitar) of a the tunefully agitated "Moving Forward," a preview of the New Zealand-based duo's forthcoming full-length, and a couple of rough-hewn gems recorded on a portable eight-track machine in Bavaria.

The Odes, Me and My Big Mouth. There's a lot of Liz Phair in Rebecca Odes's homemade pop, especially when she sings a line like "My mind turned out to be the most fuckable part of me" on the bristling yet tuneful "All Talk, No Action." But that doesn't diminish the prickly charm of the Odes' debut EP, or blunt any of the candy-coated razorblades strategically placed over the course of the disc's eight songs.

Karl Hendricks Trio, for a while, it was funny. What's a lonely kid from Pittsburgh with a bad case of romantic confusion to do? Well, if you're Hendricks, you could just write hard-hitting punk-pop tunes and then undercut the muscular guitars and forceful backbeats with a wicked wit and self-depreciating lyrics like "Somewhere, someone's having a weekend of sin/But not here, not you, not me."

-- Matt Ashare