Since the dust from the great Chris Ott vs. William Bowers battle settled, the buzz around Numbers has been pretty drab. Back in 2002, you had a blast either shellacking or safeguarding the San Fran trio's fidgety post-punk debut Life, respectively aligning with the Ott or Bowers camps. Question is: How did Numbers ever cause such ballyhoo? Perhaps with the upsurge of "The ____s" bands, indie gatekeepers felt obligated to strike preemptively. Whether that meant sabotaging any possible cash-in with retro-crazed MTV2 and NME or being the first to herald tomorrow's potential "it" band, Numbers dubiously pitted brother against brother in a war way bigger than its cause. So that's the history; here's the neatly packaged blurb: Numbers gleefully rehash excitable late 70s bands like Devo and XTC, their buoyancy unfazed by the unoriginal, derivative material.
Considering Numbers' lack of divulged material (their first two true LP's combine for less than 45 minutes), We're Animals feels like the long-awaited main event after two sneak previews, and the payoff is-- power-pop, sort of. It's like suddenly these guys believe they're the New Pornographers. We're Animals comes chock full of bubblegum hooks, vocal harmonies, and tripartite rock song structures (Gasp...bridges!). Unfortunately, Numbers' newfound Ritalin-treated sound doesn't mean more ideas, just longer ones, and the result is about as fun as an overstretched Slinky.
Topographically, the album resembles a grim cardiogram printout-- generally flat with a few spiked moments of nervy chaos. Opener "Beast Life" jerks you from point A to B, though the actual sections they divide play it safe technically. Lead singer Indra Dunis's incoherent squalls are also scrapped, supplanted by droning nursery rhyme cadences similar to Deerhoof's Satomi. "Funny But Sad" goes sing-song, Kim Deal-style, recalling the airy, simple verses of "I Bleed" and "Invisible Man". Despite a helter-skelter breakdown, the track ends with a campy call-and-answer titular chorus complemented by intermittent shouts of "I laughed!/ I cried!"
The emphasis to melody on We're Animals is reminiscent of off-kilter mutant disco hits such as "I Know What Boys Like". On "The Fuck You Garage", Dunis stoically half-sings, half-chants "I know it well/ It looks like hell" over a clumsy moog riff, eventually crash landing the song headfirst into a catatonic anti-chorus. Here, the struggle between saccharine pop, deceptively saccharine pop and classic bloody nose punk becomes most apparent. We're Animals still has haywire guitars, bushwhacking rhythms, and those homemade synthesizers we're always hearing about, but the real story is the band's conflicted strategy for melody. Sadly, Numbers too often chicken-hearts, stifling catchiness immediately after having blunted a song's jittery fun beyond repair.
