Birds & Batteries: Up to No Good

Birds & Batteries new EP Up to No Good is very seventies – not the familiar hemp-and-Zep era of revivalists like the Black Crowes and Kings of Leon, but the paranoid, coked-out decade of George Romero, Charles Manson and Travis Bickle. They marry jittery Funkadelic guitars to slick drum machine beats and jammy/experimental keyboard flourishes, then blend it all into some kind of ungodly apocalyptic disco. (Their touchstone is clearly Goblin, toward whose cheeseball soundtrack grandeur they aspire.)

The whole thing works better on paper than it does on the record. The EP is filled with some great bits and pieces – the gaspingly manic bass line of “Sneaky Times,” the chiming guitars that spiral down through “The Villain” – which don’t quite fit to form a compelling whole. If the album is a horror movie – which I think is what it wants to be – it’s a great setting, atmospheric cinematography, a few strong performances in search of story with some real scares.

The music is oversaturated and indulgent, though that's not really a criticism – they've clearly built an intentional aesthetic out of oversaturated indulgence. The problem, in fact, is that it’s not indulgent enough – they feel like they're holding back. Cracked-out stuff like this needs to be committed, the teeth need to grind and the pulse needs to jump. There's a slick detachment in the vocals that's probably supposed to be coldly ominous, but it's mostly just boring.

The kiss of death, in other words, and the reason the album doesn’t work for me is this: these guys sound sober.