Forget chugging beer or smoking weed or huffing paint thinner-- you wanna fit in with the cool crowd, you'll listen to Radiohead. Not to sound like an insensitive, sanctimonious aficionado, but The Bends, OK Computer, and Kid A have probably been abused in more high school parties than anything some 25-year-old dude down the block sells. Enter Strange We Should Meet Here, that guy sporting an Old Navy Performance Fleece, driving his Ford Mustang, wearing his visor upside-down and popping his collar to a party mix that juxtaposes "Karma Police" with "Mr. Jones" and some Limp Bizkit track.
Then again, what's to be expected from two teens fresh out of high school, gallivanting around a Seattle scene growing more infamous for its kitsch bands than famous for its rock legends? The duo, consisting of singer Michael Harris and versatile instrumentalist Daniel Anderson, reaches for a Kid A aesthetic and produces just that-- a hollow, superficial burlesque of laptop pop and space rock with none of the emotion, innovation, and flat-out substance that a band like Radiohead spew out in their sleep. Of course, condemning this record for its inferiority to Radiohead would be downright unethical, but this is no Hood or Elbow caliber aping; it's bastardization on par with Keane or Athlete.
First red flag: "A Day in the Life of a Poolshark", which opens with harmless keyboard arpeggios, quickly turns to stale grunge electronica before degenerating to a scream-laden outro reminiscent of Linkin Park. Harris's Jekyll/Hyde singing style becomes increasingly arduous during the album as one moment he's emulating Thom Yorke's subtlest idiosyncrasies (right down to singing "skin" as "ski-yayn") and another he's shredding his vocal chords, screaming incoherently.
Stuff really goes to shit by "Morerae (The Locust)", a pop culture dumpster beginning with a voicemail sample ("End of message, to erase this message, press '7'") and setting the stage for "Militance Prom", Idiot Pilot's foray into, ahem, rap. That's right, amidst all the IDM ambience and droning, soporific vocals, Harris decides to drop some rhymes he wrote while not paying attention in social studies: "Yo check this/ I'm-a chill like the cubes of ice/ When I mention Calcutta ya'll feel the spice/ As I roll with a two-tone cellular phone/ And get blown like inflation." It's beyond "rip-off." It's beyond "poseur." It doesn't even know what the fuck it wants to be. It's just two kids with way too much access to recording equipment, the musical equivalent of a monkey with a hand grenade.
