Conceptually, it's hard to be mad at CSS. They're young and pretty and fun and Brazilian! They play damaged, high-strung new wave with electro squiggles and winky self-aware lyrics about fucking and dancing! They're Friends Of Diplo! Just about everything about them is bright and plastic and eye-catching, and that's probably how they've ended up on Sub Pop, a label not exactly known for its devotion to dancefloor hedonism. And that's not a bad thing; indie-rock could always use a little help ditching its predilection toward depressive mumbling, and this is clearly a band with nothing but contempt for depressive mumbling. So CSS should be great, right?
Well, that depends. How much did you like that first Bis album? Because that's pretty much what you're getting here: rudimentary punk bashers with disco hi-hats and trebly amped-up chanting and buzzing keyboards and surf-guitar twangs and simplistic structures and absolutely no hints at subtlety, ever.
The vocals are generally chirpy and terrible. With her broken English and thick accent, singer Lovefoxxx doesn't sound all that far off from electroclash's whole fake-German shtick, but at least her accent is real. It's hard to hear her words sometimes, but it's always easy to hear her snotty half-sarcasm, her come-ons more sneered than purred ("I know how you're doing by looking at your pants/ And this is how we call it a comeback"). And she's not above biting the lyrics of better bands in painfully obvious ways (the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Art Star" on "Art Bitch," Mu's "Paris Hilton" on "Meeting Paris Hilton"). The band likes its production tinny, all squeaky synths and ugly, damaged guitars, which occasionally leads to deeply shitty experiments like the unlistenable Casio-polka lope of "Alcohol". CSS's whole fast-and-cheap aesthetic is more fun to think about than to actually hear; more often than not, their songs end up sounding like the crappy filler tracks from the first Le Tigre album.
Still, CSS has a few great little tricks in its arsenal. When they stop arching their eyebrows and put some work into doing time-tested pop stuff, they can be great. "Patins" has a nice buzzsaw guitar hook and a searingly desperate chorus hook: "Whenever I look at you/ I don't know what to do/ Whenever you talk to me/ I don't know what is true." "Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above" has an actual groove: a great ripply disco bassline and glassy keyboard tweets and a rock-guitar breakdown that actually sounds something like Death From Above. And "This Month, Day 10" is a nice retro new wave set-piece, restless but fun. There's a pattern here: CSS does its best work when it cuts its shtick with a few recognizable human emotions and maybe even a hint of vulnerability. After all, it's 2006, and we're running out of ways to say "Fuck you."
