Neospastics

The Neospastics are hard to classify, their front cover art (a half-dressed toy doll, with black tape over her eyes and bright pink text) suggests something between DIY punk rock and perhaps electro-clash, alternately the back cover art holds a photo of four seriously dark and heavy looking lads. Cuts with titles like "Songs For Assholes” and "XXX for President” suggest something even harder, while other songs with names like "Bubblegum Reality,” "Love Behind Your Sky” and "Dance Another Day” suggest the opposite yet again. So what are the Neospastics, other than Swiss, that is? Well, it should be said, they are damn surprising. Each track on this album is well-crafted, unique, and blessed with sparklingly clean production. And somewhat true to their cover image, they are dark, but more in the vein of Marilyn Manson (without the controversial lyrics). The Neospastics choose hooks over a pounding suffocating heaviness and they choose musicianship over all out noisescapes — the result is an album that successfully borrows from over half a dozen genres (predominately metal, glam, grunge, industrial, and alt-rock but there are even some more unusual traditional ones in there) and 70 percent of the time they turn these thefts into a sort of catchy pure pop brilliance. The band is quoted as saying that they could care less how their music is categorised, this will probably be a marketing nightmare for someone someday but this reviewer is content to simply classify this as: eclectic, if a bit all over the place, but still pretty damned listenable.