Album Reviews

Hex Girls Pop Fluff

HEXGIRLS.COM

In typically warped Hex Girls humor, the back of the 10” vinyl version of Hex Girls’ new EP Pop Fluff shows a taxonomic chart with the caption “Hex Girls feed off of the energy of heterotrophs.” The food chain presented includes “Evil” and “Truth,” “Death,” “Boredom,” “Sex” which leads to “Scratch,” “Itch” and “Pop Fluff.”

This lampooning of scientific study speaks to the themes of Pop Fluff and really the general M.O. of Hex Girls since their last album, 2019’s More of That—human or animal basic urges and desires set to twitchy and nervous backbeats and guitars. Even at their shiny and poppiest, there is still an air of menace and paranoia below it all. The spiritual antecedent of Hex Girls would be early Talking Heads: songs like “Psycho Killer” and pretty much all of 1979’s Fear of Music. One great example is “Electric Eel” which certainly recalls the first-person feverish rants of David Byrne:

“The snake in my heart / It just wants loose / It just wants you / Plastic brain and I can’t think / I’m on the edge / close to the brink / burning bower of my one desire / Malaria nightmare / I’m on the wire.”

In a recent interview with Tony Dehner from Iowa Public Radio, the band said that the

title Pop Fluff came as a joke arising from the fact that they were listening to pop during its recording. It’s clear that while they certainly didn’t create a Top 40 radio-friendly record, Pop Fluff is a more polished effort compared to the feral bombast of More of That. This is at least in part thanks to an expanded sonic toolbox, accomplished by adding Christian Ebintino on drums allowing Ross Klemz to move to keys. Even with the sheen of studio finish, the record still maintains the band’s signature sinister, propulsive swagger. “Lookin’ For The Facts” is a great example of this, with its driving beat peppered with shakers and gigantic guitar chords dropped right in the pocket. The sneering chorus of backing vocals recalls mid-’70s Alice Cooper. Clearly by design, it is difficult to ascertain whether these songs are written from human or animal perspective: Lyrics such EVEN AT THEIR SHINy AND POPPIEST, THERE IS STILL AN AIR OF MENACE AND PARANOIA BELOW IT ALL. as “I’d like to feel your spaghetti brains, all over me,” from “Cats With No Teeth (Catch No Mice)” and “Kill or be killed/Eat or be eaten,” from “Rabid Creature” play with that ambiguity. To paraphrase General Zaroff in Richard Connell’s 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game”: “The world is made up of two classes, the hunter and the hunted.” Pop Fluff presents the facts in a uniquely Hex Girls fashion leaving the listener to decide whether the tales told are cautionary or celebratory. Either way these toe-tapping trips through the morgue mark an impressive evolution of Hex Girls—and one that certainly scratches our itch. —Michael Roeder

SlW cc Watt

Real Manic Time

SLWCCWATT.BANDCAMP.COM

Being Iowa City’s—scratch that, Iowa’s—most prolific songwriter for years, you would think it would be hard to keep surprising people. While most of us gorged on trashy Netflix documentaries or started and stopped fad hobbies to fill in for the lack of human contact, Sam Locke Ward (also an award-winning cartoonist for Little Village) comes out of the pandemic with a new band, a new album and a new collaborative partner: Mike Watt.

Yes, THE Mike Watt of Minutemen and Firehose fame. (To say I was shocked upon hearing about this team-up is an understatement.)

Real Manic Time, the first release of SLW cc Watt (a nice nod to the online nature of the project), dropped on Bandcamp May 1.

Here,we get 30 tracks at just under 38 minutes, a series of short songs and spoken word collages that, like the title suggests, invokes the feelings of a brand of mania only the last year could have inspired. This loose narrative is told through Locke Ward’s unique brand of weirdo pop, irreverent punk and crazed-smile satire and Watt narrating a series of vignettes, small one-shot stories where unnamed protagonists run into the absurdity of autocrats and the rules imposed by them.

The album starts with “The Verdict,” where, over a layer of Phil Specter-like ooohs and aahs, Watt tells us of the fate of our first anonymous victim of the system. “Something Lost” follows, a sympathetic punk ballad about desperation that also has the distinction of being one of the longer songs on the album, at nearly two minutes. This is also the first appearance of one of the two other collaborators in this project, drummer Grace Locke Ward (Petit Mal, Leslie and the Ly’s), a rare sighting and much needed treat. Bob Bucko Jr, the final team member shows up on track three, “Darkness Reigns,” with a whimsical whisper of flute (he’ll return with later with sax).

The shortness of the songs keep the album moving along. Just as you start shaking your head along to the faux-handclaps and syrupy delivery of “Something Lost,” it’s over, and the drum machine, discordant sax and staccato guitar punch burst in, delivering you into “History Belongs to the Whiners.” Or as you find yourself feeling as whimsical as Bucko’s flute and Watt’s bouncing bass in “Fleeting Are the Times,” the Spaghetti-Western guitars accompanying Watt’s fake commercial voice in “Lip Service” begin. All of that right before the soaring Pixies-esque guitars of one of my favorite tracks, “Lie Broken By the Truth.”

The bait-and-switch of the sequencing might sound disarming but it actually pays off, building a loose but cohesive thematic thread throughout. It is impossible to listen to Real Manic Time and not think of the last year and a half of uncertainty, isolation and encroaching cynicism that is the result of watching our money-driven, me-first economy flail around. The stories told through song and narration take place in a bleak world, a timeline very familiar to many of us, but SLW cc Watt tells them with a sense of humor punctuated with a wink and a snarl.