Avenpitch- Butterfly Radio

Avenpitch open their second album with "A Safer Car," an altogether unexceptional rock song with vaguely punkish undertones and a few keyboard beeps for color. Just when you're settling in for a long boring ride, however, they kick in with the second track, the intriguingly titled "Jack The Idiot Dance," an appealingly frantic blur of drum machines, random sound effects, and energetic but disaffected vocals. This is a much better example of the Minnesota band's sound, a fun blend of punk, early New Wave, and straight-up old-fashioned American rock 'n' roll that's at once reminiscent of both the Talking Heads and Mindless Self Indulgence. While they don't always quite live up to the cleverness of their concepts -- "Disposable Pop Song" is as repetitious as the Top 20 music it mocks -- there's plenty of fun to be had here. While the basic arrangements are all fairly similar, with '70s garage and punk guitars colored by an array of electronic effects, the individual adornments for each song vary from the modern synthpop pianos of "Messalina" to the old-school hip-hop hi-hat running through "Like Rain." Then of course there's "Düsseldorf," which apes the modern electroclash scene's obsession with retro dance music and sounds dated and fresh all at the same time. Definitely more rock than pop, Avenpitch's sound is a welcome relief to alternative music fans who are burnt out on both the bloated aggression of modern metal and the twee melodrama of today's underground pop scene. Like the genre-blurring early days of New Wave, Avenpitch effortlessly combine raw guitar energy with enough electronics to keep you dancing.

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