The Ladies - They Mean Us - Temporary Residence
It’s not so much that I don’t like noisy rock, it’s that I don’t like it when things could be better. Here, on They Mean Us by the Ladies, that’s just the case. The dudes of The Ladies (one from the noisy Hella and the other from the poppier Pinback) bang away for a bit over half an hour on a drum and a guitar, creating insistent rhythms over which they attempt to add harmony/melody to varying degrees of success. When they are not careful it often feels like it’s on the verge of dissolving into an ugly mess of chords and drum hits, but when it works it sounds nice enough. Ultimately, though, it sabotages itself with noise segments and doesn’t offer a reason for repeat listens. For “noisy” rock it does pretty well on the listenability scale: there’s no caterwauling or screeching feedback and the singing is fairly pleasant, though that may be a turnoff for potential fans. That means that this album will probably fall into one of those unfortunate crevices between genres, not extreme enough to be a true noise album yet outside of the realm of the taste of most music listeners.
For a “sounds like” description, allow me to bring back some unfortunate memories: when they get their act together, this band sounds an awful lot like Incubus. At lot less in the way of production values/rap junk, but that’s really it. When they don’t get their act together it sounds like Incubus got really drunk and forget how to play their instruments in mid-song. Once a song manages to get over two and a half minutes, it usually turns out to be decent, as in the case of “Non-threatening” and “And Them,” and the more delicate passages, coupled with the complexity of the drums, makes for some interesting moments. On the other hand, I could have done without any or all of the song fragments under two minutes. “Mandatory Psych Freakout,” if broken down into sections and then fleshed out individually, would give this album the meat that it needs to remain worthwhile over a greater period of time instead of the five days it’ll take me before I forget that this album ever existed. However, for fans of these sorts of bands, check this album out and you may have more success with it than I have. – Steven Reilly
