Most people seem to hold a fundamental aversion to making a pure spectacle of themselves. It's a fact I find dispiriting, yet quite the rule: Save an opportunity to score a few second's face time on the latest shock brand of reality television, the rewards don't justify the risk these days. Conformity pays and pays well. I take in uptown Charlotte, surveying battalions of reinforcements along Trade Street as the mere differentiating factors between any two brave jaywalkers are found in the silver letters of a briefcase monogram or the fit on a pair of pleated khakis. There's no pageantry, no ostentation, no grandstanding-- no damn fun. And I'll wager now that An Albatross will never play here. This transplanted Pennsylvanian is good for at least a word of warning to the band: Do not schedule us.
This banker's paradise couldn't host any of Philadelphia-bred An Albatross' wildly off kilter expositions of dissevered carnivalesque dementia. Depending on when and where you catch them, you could witness anything from costumed sock-hopping to orgiastic food fights-- and all set to the band's sub-minute, licentious flurries of proletariat dance metal intoxication.
We Are the Lazer Viking, the band's sophomore effort, captures eleven songs in about eight minutes. Ranging in length between :21 and 1:24, these brief tracks spotlight vocalist Edward B. Geida III shrieking his way through volatile bursts of digital meltdown and pure metalthrashing. New to the band is a second keyboard player, which serves to clean up the sound a bit; his oddly inviting Farfisa melodies form the bedrock of most of the album, surfacing even when you don't have time enough to bob your head but twice.
The highlight might be the 1:13 of "The Revolutionary Politics of Dance", and (1:24 later) the :42 of "Get Faster, Cry for Happy". Both songs blend electric grindcore bursts and wavelike synth-lulls into supremely rhythmic bouts of delirium. Of the three instrumental tracks, "J7j7j7j7j7j7j7j7j7j7j7j" sounds like a peek at the broiled labor of a steel-factory, while closer "W7w7w7w7w7w7w7w7w7w7w7" is cartoonish enough to feel at home on a Max Tundra album. Oh, brave Vikings of the North, your apocalyptic unrest is valiant. Though I suppose the live show of foreboding destruction is the real An Albatross experience; the record doesn't satisfy. If you live in a real city, though, consider this a warning.
