A few months ago, I lost a disposable camera. I usually don't get too worked up about misplacing things, but the film in this camera had been exposed to the likes of Bob Dylan, Beck, Neil Young, and Grandaddy at Denmark's Roskilde festival. I'll get over that. But I'll never be able to recover any tangible evidence of my encounter with eX-Girl, the all-female post-punk trio from planet Kero Kero.
Yeah, you know, that place where men are giant yellow frogs, and everyone loves to eat space mushrooms.
Decked out in red, white, and blue skirts with pastel, bloated headdress that made Erykah Badu's turbans seem bourgeois, these dirty three were aiming to send the entire tent to their home world with neon-fretted instruments, a Casiotone, and a drummer who does not sit. Their treble-heavy Japanese vocal timbre is supported by portions of all-out operatic voices and three-part harmonies. Perhaps you can understand my anguish at losing those photos. This was a sight to behold.
"Waving Scientist @ Frog King" opens Back to the Mono Kero, the band's second album, with an erratic three-part a cappella about poor King Frog, whose space plane is grounded, preventing him from returning to his home planet, Frog. The lyrics are in English, but were it not for the transcriptions in the liner notes, we would probably never make sense of ex-Girl's ramblings: "Scientist told Poor KING FROG/ 'Get 5 things and mix those up.'/ It'll be fuel for the plane to get back sweet home planet Frog. [sic]" The trio proceeds to blast a newswire-ish vocal alert that leads into a fuzz-distorted guitar which plays modulating scales to the alternating time signatures being quite forcefully beaten out by the standing drummer.
To proceed with the already-strange-enough storyline, eX-Girl rallies to gather those required ingredients for King Frog: "Let's get excrements of dog/ Marshmallow stuck to the sole of red shoe/ High purity heroin and the atom heart mother/ What is the last one?" All this is sung in a jarring melody that appears to be randomly generated akin to the intro. The subtle coherence and frenetic delivery of the vocals, along with the driving weight of the accompaniment, make this track the apex of the record. Not to mention the operatic drama of the three-part harmony bridge.
Mono Kero doesn't immediately go sour after the opening track, but the songs get progressively less enthralling. Most of the arrangements center around out-of-control lyrics and vocal styles, with heavy doses of stand-up drumming, overprocessed guitar distortion, and Casiotone thrown in for a bit of noise. However, the smooth harmony and ecstatic vocal delivery in the Robin Scott cover, "Pop Muzik," make the song a highlight and an exception to the band's formula.
An interlude straight from the theme for Disney's Electric Light Parade is stuck amidst the 5/4 guitar jangle of "Cucumber Surrender," and feels simply gauche juxtaposed with the song's raunchy verses: "Before you slice him up and make him a meal/ Stroke your cucumber/ Let him know how you feel." The synth dream breaks into a Metallican power-chord death-march before retreating back into more bizarre double entendres involving "angry vegetables."
The ten-minute instrumental "Crime of the Century" could have provided a much-needed breath from the overbearing heaviness and lyrical absurdity of the album. Its plaintive main sections of arpeggiated guitar, synth accents, and vocal punctuations (reminiscent of Kim Deal's "eye-yie-yie-yie" part in the Pixies' "River Euphrates") succeed, yet this lengthy centerpiece loses its footing on the forced avant-garde jazz improv of the guitar and the hyper-fuzz bass freak-outs dispersed throughout the track.
What seems to be missing from Back to the Mono Kero is not focus, but restraint. Many of the songs repeat their gibberish verses multiple times or overextend their reach instrumentally. Live, eX-Girl's energy sustained the active flow of the arrangements, thus their sound never got tired. Or perhaps I just got caught up in the space mushroom frenzy of it all.
