I've gotta hand it to Adult.: They're more willing than most to follow their muse into potentially embarrassing spots. Yeah, they started off faultless; the strobe-light electro on their early singles was so precise that you had to assume they knew exactly what they were doing. But then comes their first LP, and geez: Suddenly they're playing shabby bass lines, the drum machine's booming from some corner of a crappy basement, and the whole shrill thing sounds as much like an art-school trainwreck as a sneaky reinvention. A single like "Don't You Stop" could reassure you that they were bringing it all back home to their strong suit, but then here we are with the D.U.M.E. EP, about which let's say this: It's certainly the logical extension of that full-length. The upshot of these six tracks seems to be that Adult. have been listening to a hell of a lot of Bauhaus. And I have to give them credit: They've followed that impulse right out to the sweet spot.
Because every time I think they've finally spun off into some dippy little world that I don't need to visit, they manage to pull me back onto their side. The shrieky basement goth on D.U.M.E. seems at first like a pretty cringeworthy development, even if you go for this kind of thing; you sort of want to let Nicola Kuperus know that yelpy witch vocals (half Peter Murphy, half Patti Smith) might not be her calling, or tell Adam Lee Miller he's better with discfloor programming than weird muddy stomps. But give it a few spins, and it starts to seem pretty useful: Who else these days is going to turn your bedroom into a bat cave? Everyone pillages the Reagan era, but who's willing to sound like a pack of raccoon-eyed art-school freaks from 1984? The sound is shrill and ridiculous, sure, but here's the half-remembered secret with this kind of stuff: No matter how self-important it may have sounded, being shrill and ridiculous was half the fun. You don't sing along with "Bela Lugosi's Dead" for its deep spiritual qualities; you just enjoy making the faces and doing the voice, and you're probably laughing while you're at it.
That's pretty much what's on offer here and Adult., as always, have a knack for embarrassing themselves in a good way. The propulsive drum programming on "Hold Your Breath" turns it into pogo cheerleading goth, or some vampire version of the B-52s; go-go bounce and weirdo yelping both make like the dark side of "Rock Lobster". The rest is a bit more of a pileup, but the bass crawl on the title track sounds like the earliest, creepiest version of the Cocteau Twins, and I'm a sucker for the Bauhaus-replica guitar that crops up everywhere else.
It's a mess, as usual, but this band has a terrific excuse: So long as no one else is willing to go quite this far out on a limb, it's not like you can say some other group is doing it better. Here's hoping they've got more high-energy sneering for their next full length, because when they're really rocking this stuff, it's a whole lot more fun than anything else on the rack.
