Nuclear Power Pants
Wicket Eats The Warrior
Wham City
Rating: 3
A challenge often confronting eccentric, visually arresting musicians is the task of transferring the spirit of frenzied and elaborate live shows onto a recorded medium. And they rarely come as weird as Baltimore’s Nuclear Power Pants. The guitar-less nine piece includes two very bearded lead singers, three female backup singers, a synth player, a keytar player and a dude that jabs a mic into an amplifier.
Wicked Eats the Warrior, the band’s debut, sounds like an unholy, LSD-addled love-child of Flipper and Polysics – marrying slow, foreboding sludge with hyper synth spazz.
But the album isn’t always successful. Without the complementary live experience and the absurd spectacle of the band going apeshit in giants, radioactive, foam lizard meets Pac-Man heads, the music’s unfocused chaos feels hollow and disorienting, often detracting from otherwise strong melodies and glorious riffage.
Give these tracks a listen: “Got Soul,” “Need Body,” “Teeth of a Lion”
For Fans Of: Butthole Surfers, Plastics
– Boris Freyman
