Does It Offend You, Yeah? - You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into - Almost Gold - 2008

Quite an interesting album, this one is. I don’t really know much about this band at all aside from hearing the album. I missed going to their show at the Mansion a month or so ago, so I really wonder how they are live. This album can really be kind of divided into two parts, with some songs going the way of almost heavy dance-metal (”With A Heavy Heart”) and the other songs going in a very strong 80s direction (”Dawn Of The Dead”) that is very similar to the direction we have seen Cut Copy and M83 go earlier this year.

The first 3 tracks on the record go for a very strong club/dark beat/dance kind of vibe with some shrieking synths tied to low thumping bass lines that could very easily be heard in dark clubs across the country. The 2nd track has a very dance/rap-metal kind of feel to it along the lines of “Bring The Noize” or something like that. The 3rd track “We Are Rockstars” wraps a strong, dirty club beat around a little vocoder bridge section. While these first few songs have a fairly good beat, and would probably work very well in a club, and do get your head bobbing, they really are kind of basic club/go crazy tracks without much more to them than that. “Dawn Of The Dead” is where you begin to see their Cut Copy-esque leanings that dominate the last half of the album. A very 80s bass lines with a light guitar hook thrown on the verse, with more synths and vocal harmonies blasted in during the chorus. This song actually works pretty well in that sense, but doesn’t quite have the same dance sense and feel that Cut Copy brings. “Doomed Now” also tries to bring an 80s type of beat, more uptempo than the previous song, but the vocoder makes another appearance here, and it kind of distracts from the song I think. “Attack of the 60 Ft. Lesbian Octopus” is a great high energy guitar instrumental kind of track in the vein of darker surf/spy rock, and is a fun little departure on the record, and really one place where they seem to be having fun with themselves. “Let’s Make Out” smacks of a song that was created around the title, but the song gets very strange on the way to the end, and is just kind of noisy. “Being Bad Feels Pretty Good” is another 80s style track, and really shows this side of the band pretty well, and is one of the better songs on here. The same goes for “Epic Last Song”, which also brings a very catchy 80s pop kind of flavor to the album.

This album isn’t really bad, but it kind of jumps all over the place, and I think maybe they would have been better served by focusing on one area and perfecting it. I think the strongest areas of the album are the 80s style jams with “Dawn of the Dead” and “Being Bad Feels Pretty Good”, but they kind of lose you in some of the other songs in between. And I think starting the album off with the harder songs kind of belies the way the rest of the album starts to go with track 4. I think there are certainly some solid fun songs, but it is the kind of record that makes you really wonder what the band is going for exactly. Are they more of the hard edge dance-metal songs in the beginning who are goofing on us by writing 80s songs, or are they more 80s style who were just having some fun screwing around with the early songs and the lesbian octopus song (my personal theory). I think there is potential here, and honestly I am kind of sad I missed the live show because if done right I bet they could put on a pretty wild live set. But ultimately I think the problem here is that there aren’t enough songs to really flesh out their sound in terms of the genre jumping that they do on the album, and in the end really sounds more as a collection of songs than a cohesive album. But I certainly think the potential is there for these guys to bring us some good shit in the future.

BV Rate: 68

Does It Offend You, Yeah? - With A Heavy Heart (I Regret To Inform You) - From You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into
Does It Offend You, Yeah? - Dawn Of The Dead - From You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into