The Rezentments
The Rezentments
(self-released)
Fit for the second stage at Ozzfest, this Pompano Beach outfit offers four songs that are essentially chunks off the same rock. Each has a scrap of melody in there somewhere, albeit one torn apart by wild boars in the middle of a Korn field. "Teacher" and "The Lizard" reveal an imaginative rhythm section roped into playing some unimaginative sledgehammer nonsense. Their bio charges that the Rezentments have "concocted a horrible plan to take the world back from the clutches of faggety [sic] boy bands and back into the grips of mere beer-drinking shmucks." A noble, if not entirely PC, concept. The artwork is the kind of thing I wouldn't have been able to take my eyes off at age nine. (www.therezentments.com)
Jim Camacho
Trouble Doll
(Broken Records)
Miami's Jim Camacho was once in a band called the Goods, which for a while there avoided even a whiff of corporate ass. Now he's bending over backward to French-kiss some pinstriped posterior with the seven-song Trouble Doll as his cloying, fawning, "Look at me!" calling card. Of course the music is pristinely produced to some highfalutin standard that's no doubt intended to pique the interest of some focus group somewhere. "This Love Is Hard" begs the question: Why put so much energy and work into something that's always going to be mistaken for Bryan Adams? Annoyingly overconfident and much too earnest, Trouble Doll conforms to a very mainstream template and seems to have abandoned its soul long ago to the idea of making it big. That's the only discernable fragrance here, unfortunately. Bryan Adams fans may well feel differently. (www.jimcamacho.com)
Ex-Cretins
People = Garbage/Apocalypse Later/Touched by the Hand of God on the Ass
(Ant Lunch Musick)
By contrast Boca Raton's Ex-Cretins sound as if they've been actively plotting the deaths of record-company executives for many years now. Indeed the ruckus created by Touched by the Hand of God on the Ass is unlikely to win friends at the A&R department in the skyscraper of your choice. Maybe it's because each of these 16 songs sounds as if it could be from a different band or because it's obvious the Ex-Cretins will never be caught jumping someone else's train. Deep-throat harmonies, questionable tunings, and twisted time signatures abound, as "Yer Mother's Boots" and "My Life with the Thrill Kill Woody Allen Cult" demonstrate. "Some Guy... Some Town" gives the impression that Boca is a haven of El Camino-driving, GPC-smoking rednecks. "Blew It All" twinkles like a star in the Meat Puppets' desert, but "Music Inspired by Not Getting on the Soundtrack to the Movie Daddy Cool" is a disorienting tour de force with a tungsten-carbide guitar and echo-chamber vocals. Touched is punk in spirit but more Beefheart or Zappa in execution. If Gamera, the giant mutant turtle of Japanese B-movie fame, had had the ability to make his own album, it might well have sounded like this. (www.ex-cretins.com)
Peerless Super Eye
A-Plomb!
(Out There Records)
Beginning with the sound of an air raid siren, A-Plomb! quickly detours into competent, tavern-friendly rock. It's pretty fun stuff, though titles such as "Kevorkian Blues" and "Hexagram Blues" suggest a thematic complexity that I must have missed on the first six or seven listens. The Miami-based outfit isn't creating anything of which we don't already have plenty; the Cheap Trick similarities are blatant and inescapable. And the singer (I guess his name is G.D. Allin) requires four aliases, which is at least three too many, since the names "Space Hippie" and "The Brain" ain't exactly lending the guy any cool points anyway. (peerlesssupereye.iuma.com, www.outthererecords.com)
Dollyrocker
Metaphysical Nipple
(self-released)
The two-man Miami band Dollyrocker makes the most of a lo-fi life. Metaphysical Nipple sounds like nothing more than a drum machine, two guitars, and a few rinky-dink keyboards. Ely and Al, our protagonists, share vocal duties, both gravitating to the high end of the spectrum. The smile-inducing title track includes wondrous little assertions such as, "Time is a tit, and I'm milking it." It's all fascinating and cool, if not entirely functional, until "When They Close the Park" ties it all together with a soft-loud dynamic, squealing falsetto outbursts, and a memorable, totally ace chorus. There's a bit of noise-for-the-sake-of-noise ("How 'Bout Them Apples" is apparently not a tribute to the Elephant Sixers) and a healthy, bilious flow of feedback coursing through every song. Obvious touchstones include Medicine and the Jesus and Mary Chain, but a DIY spirit and an attractively naive pop sensibility are also at work here. There's just no premade box to toss Dollyrocker's experimental songs into -- to the band's credit.
