The word "schizo" is an oft-invoked music-critic term used as easy short-hand to describe sudden shifts in style and structure, or deliberate genre-hopping eclecticism. But if we are going to appropriate the name of a debilitating mental disorder simply to quantify an artist's musical whims, best to apply it to a band that actually sounds like two split personalities fighting for control over the same vessel, where the songs share a certain elemental consistency but behave in markedly different ways. By that measure, San Francisco trio 60 Watt Kid are certifiably schizo.
Every song on the band's debut utilizes the same rudiments-- reverbed guitar ripples, distorted organ drones, spare tambourine-rattled rhythms and frontman Kevin Litrow's mantric incantations-- but their interaction produces two distinct outcomes: serene, psychedelic reveries and sleazy garage skronk. Litrow is at least self-aware enough to recognize his band's internal contradictions; as he sings at the outset of one song: "I've been thinking of things that confuse me." But it's this very sense of bewilderment that keeps you intrigued even throughout this lengthy, 14-song debut's more ponderous passages, to see if 60 Watt Kid's dichotomous dispositions eventually work toward a peaceful reconciliation.
And peace does seem to be the end goal here, if the album's best and most fully realized song is anything to go by: The eight-minute "Ocsicnarf Nas" is a marvel of sustained, slow-release euphoria, its glistening guitar trembles and tribal drum builds working together to send Litrow's indecipherably echo-drenched vocals skyward in triumph. But the song's entrancing effect is immediately shattered by the first installment of the two-part "American Standard", an excerpt from what sounds like an endless "Sister Ray"-style organ grind, wherein Litrow assumes the megaphoned voice of a mad auctioneer barker. It's a pattern that repeats itself throughout the album's duration: "Chem Trials"-- a similarly styled and, as such, somewhat less striking companion to "Ocsicnarf Nas"-- is rudely up-ended by the broke-down blues of "Need a Job", which sounds like something Jon Spencer might sing to himself in the welfare line, complete with affected fat-Elvis drawl; the lighter-waving Floydian psych-folk anthem "The Road" works itself up into a cacophonous freak-out to set up the throat-shredding, "96 Tears" garage-slop of "I Got Money".
Perhaps these jarring juxtapositions are 60 Watt Kid's comment on modern life, where dreams of escape are inevitably undermined by the harsh, day-to-day realities of trying to make rent. Or maybe they simply can't figure out if they want to be Animal Collective or the Blues Explosion. But the album's conclusion suggests they may not have to make a decision: Following a suitably sodden last-call shanty called "The End of the War", 60 Watt Kid get on with peace process, in the form of a hidden-track instrumental jam that finds the band's dreamy organ swirls and gutter-blues grittiness coalescing into a steady, motorik motion-- one that proves the difference between 60 Watt Kid's split personalities is really just a function of whether they're taking bong hits in the basement or gas-huffing in the garage.
