Having blown way more money at 4o Watt, Nowhere Bar, and Schoolkids Records than I care to mention, I can say from personal experience that everything you've heard about Athens, Ga., being a wonderland of fluid indie rock collectives, Southern hospitality, and dirt cheap rent is true. But want to know what band's been most consistently holding the Classic City down for the past decade? Not R.E.M., they were coasting on cred even before they went defunct. of Montreal? Please, you're thinking too hard. Drive-By Truckers? Definitely a contender. But the answer here would be jam-band warhorses Widespread Panic.
I use this exercise as a reminder that Athens is an artistic utopia but also essentially a suburb of Atlanta, and like any major college town, many of the 30-40,000 kids who call it home seriously like nothing more than to throw the fuck down. This explains why Athens is every bit as likely to spawn a band like Reptar as it is Pylon, and it's not just because their press photos look like surveillance footage from an AEPi hazing ritual. With all the indiscriminate enthusiasm and unearned confidence of young adults on the precipice of self-discovery, Reptar uses their debut Body Faucet as a vat in which to hastily dump the past five years of top shelf indie into some kind of frat party-stoking jungle juice.
But if Body Faucet indeed replaces the likes of "That Was a Crazy Game of Poker" during at least one keg bust, it's done a tremendous service, right? Seems kinda churlish to harsh the vibes since Reptar are clearly friendly guys not trying to put one over on us: This isn't fronting like a replacement for the likes of Vampire Weekend or Passion Pit or Yeasayer or Animal Collective and Reptar are likely just as excited for those bands' new albums as you are. Besides, even if everything about the band screams that it wasn't a matter of if they were going to name themselves after a kitschy 90s reference, but which one, the fact a remarkably similar but exponentially more awful band named Coolrunnings exists means we could do a lot worse.
Still, Body Faucet proudly manifests its influence on about as basic of a level as possible, right down to the hiring of Ben H. Allen. We're still obligated to mention he produced Merriweather Post Pavilion, but his C.V.'s getting awful crammed with the likes of Fanfarlo and Bombay Bicycle Club, starched-shirt indie-pop bands looking for an extreme "Summertime Clothes" makeover. Reptar was always pretty tie-dye to begin with, but they fit in that lineage, since Body Faucet operates on fairly standard melodic progressions that could be strummed out by any acoustic-toting dorm rover. But under Allen's guidance, they're doubled by plinky electric guitar runs, tripled by keyboards, and if that's not enough, hey, we got these kids here, let’s have them sing the hook. This extends what otherwise might've been punchy songs past five minutes, but it's all there, the jumpy polyrhythms and wiggled guitar runs and buzzing synth riffs shellacked to a blinding sheen so it'll play just as good to people who think King Sunny Ade is a juice stand at Lenox Square Mall.
But so what if their Afro-tribal-electro-twee-pop is indeed all sugar and no roughage; is it a crime to make Annuals look like they were actually ahead of their time? No, but all of the above means essentially little since every time Graham Ulicny opens up his throat, you just wanna yell "this is all your fault!" at the nearest .jpeg of Panda Bear and Avey Tare. I mean, it really is: I've always considered Merriweather Post Pavilion to be The Soft Bulletin of its decade and 10 years ago, the Reptars of the indiesphere sported a mewling, no-attack whine decked out by saturated synth strings and drums redlining with distortion. But Animal Collective understood the relationship between form and function, and the visceral shrieking of their earlier work was meant as a conveyance for the primal, occasionally unspeakable urges contained therein. But despite attempts at lyrical heft detailing a too-vague sexual awakening ("Sebastian") and an encomium for a friend ("Ghost Bike"), Ulicny undermines himself on a second-by-second basis by finding no lyric that can't be subjected to at least six different forms of contortion regardless of its content. Is there any reason for a line such as "Daniel left you for another boy/ Indeed he did you like a windup toy/ Oh why-o, why-o" to be sung like you're trying to one-up Dave Longstreth in a vocal game of H.O.R.S.E.? I mean, if you're going to stuff a song called "Orifice Origami" with four octaves of goosed-up pitch exaggeration and reserve your most strangulated affectations to deliver the title of "Please Don't Kill Me", does that mean you have all the self-awareness in the world or absolutely none at all?
Not that gravitas should be expected from a band whose name instantly inspires memories of raspy cartoon toddlers in awe of a monster dinosaur. And from most accounts, Reptar are "known" for their "fun live show," understandable because they are nothing if not insistent: Body Faucet as a whole clocks in at damn near an hour, which would be wholly indefensible, but then again, you come from a place like Athens, 35 minutes is not gonna give a Caledonia crowd enough time to get as liquored up as they want. I have to admit, sometimes I wonder if I resent Body Faucet for making me feel way older than my years, but then I mostly realize I don't envy college kids in the age of Twitter, because Reptar is their kind of band: accessible to way more information than they can fully process, desperate for attention, and prone to the most public of embarrassments.
