Should an alien race ever need a one-stop primer on the global diversity of the past few decades' pop music, Barcelona's the Pinker Tones ought to be able to keep them from laying waste to our major population centers for a night or two. The pseudonymous duo of Mister Furia and Professor Manso put something for every euro-waving reveler on their 2006 stateside debut, The Million Colour Revolution, dabbling in lounge, bossa nova, funk, and enough other genres to keep up with their Spanish, English, French, and German lyrics. Prodded along by dance beats, the album also hearkened back to the 1990s' internationalist indie pop of groups like Pizzicato Five and Cibo Matto.
Wild Animals, which follows last year's More Colours! remix LP, plays around in the same pluralistic pool. Although its stylistic breadth still dizzies, the ideas have started to sound a little shallow. There's Daft Punk electro-kitsch here, woozy Air luxuriance over there, and plenty of Beta Band-esque harmonies all around, but the allusions are rarely as satisfying as the hypothetical record collection they represent. At a time when U.S. music listeners are already enjoying a particularly diverse assortment of global sounds-- from Bollywood to the Balkans, Kunduru to chanson, Afropop to gamelan, by American artists and international ones-- an album can't get by on its border-crossing eclecticism alone. Wild Animals is a party in international waters; what it lacks is an occasion.
Not that Furia and Manso have lost their high, supple voices or jingle-ready melodies. With a squishily funky bass line, opener "Hold On" winds up sounding like a self-help Beck-- "Hold on to your dreams, 'cause it's a long way home," the singers repeat-- but not until after a choir-like intro that's the best homage to Brian Wilson's SMiLE opener "Our Prayer" since the Earlies did one back in 2004. "S.E.X.Y. R.O.B.O.T.", meanwhile, is silly electro-house fun that soon wears out its welcome-- good luck getting that vocoder-like spelling lesson out of your head, though. The Pinker Tones do best when they set their globe-pillaging ideas to more fully-fledged songs, as on first single "Happy Everywhere", a scrambled acoustic-pop song with squelching synths, Mancini-esque strings, cowbell, and a chorus that's at once cheerful and a bit paranoid. The wordless "Fugaz" is thwomping blog-house, ready for its Modular signing; another standout, "24", confronts a quarter-life crisis with a horns-blasting chorus.
The Pinker Tones' pan-genre versatility and fearless pursuit of fun could've made them a Spanish Super Furry Animals, but a few of these songs could do with a bit more super (possibly fur, too). "Biorganised"-- with some burbling bass, translucent acoustic guitar, and a harmonica solo-- follows the Moon Safari template too closely for its own good. "Working Bees" is tuneful, falsetto-led space-funk that likens the band to bees "making honey for your ears." Oh, and "The Whistling Song" is four minutes of ska about whistling. The Pinker Tones already tried much of this stuff more successfully on their last proper LP; as refreshing as it still is to hear a group so unconstrained by a single sound, the songs on Wild Animals can't quite fill the wider world their style envisions. I for one welcome our new alien overlords.
