"LA Murder Hotel"
Friday, October 20, 2006 at 5:43PM 
I find it really hard to listen to something from Europe -- France in particular -- with a negative bias against the music. They've got too good a track record, and while there's plenty of junk coming out of the country, that sexy foreign style overrides any let downs I experience. Maybe I should be more judgmental, but hey, my current outlook only opens me up to a more diverse range of styles and genres.
And Poni Hoax does a pretty good job of covering up their intrinsic French-ness, I must say, so I was a little surprised to read that they hail from Paris. Listening to their stuff is indeed confounding, though ... traces of kraut-rock throughout, hints of a love for DEVO, and an obvious desire to be tacked on some DFA-released mix (sometimes I feel like Nicolas channels Alex Kapranos). While all of their tracks have their own unique characteristic -- "She's On the Radio" being their whacked-out electroclash tune and "Budapest" being their stylish, moody and atmospheric dance track, for example -- there's something uniting about everything. The sultry vocals, the smooth synth lines, the crisp, bouncy guitars and bass lines, the layering of a surprising number of melodies and hooks ...
They've got their stuff together. Listen to additional songs of their on their MySpace page.
Poni Hoax - L.A. Murder Hotel
Robert Pollard has been cranking out rock/pop gems for a long time now and he just doesn't seem capable of slowing down. As the principle member of Guided by Voices, Pollard wrote and recorded so many catchy 2-minute songs that standard LPs just weren't enough for him. A lot of his best tracks instead found their way onto EP's or big box sets that contained unreleased demos and outtakes. In addition to GBV's staggering output (check allmusic if you don't believe me because "prolific" is an understatement here), Pollard has been recording and releasing albums under either his own name or under a variety of one-time side projects. Since the official disbanding of guided By Voices in 2004, Uncle Bob Pollard has released two legitimate solo albums. From a Compound Eye came out January of this year and featured a double-album's worth of Pollard's musical experiments. This week marks the release of his second solo album since the end of GBV and Normal Happiness delivers the short, catchy rock n' roll songs that Guided By Voices fans have come to know and love. "Supernatural Car Lover" is one of my favorite tracks because it features the kind of catchy, bouncy guitar that just feels good. You can listen to the track 
Recidivism.org has a stream of the Trail Of Dead version:
A side project from the duo of singer/songwriter Keren Ann Zeidel and Bardi Johannson (lead singer of Iceland's Bang Gang), this all-too-short concept album (38 minutes) is about two children inhabiting the bodies of grown-ups, and not wanting to go back, only to realize the whole thing was in their minds. Exploring musical roots from Lou Reed’s "Stephanie Says" and an airy rendition of "Suicide is Painless", the theme song from M*A*S*H*, this album is both beautiful in how it experiments musically and how it incorporates eerie yet silly and amusing vocals that somehow evoke both pleasure and discomfort in the listener. The Duo presents a series of simple songs strung together by a few interludes that abuse the effects of pitch shifting and reverb to create youthful voices. From beginning to end, Lady & Bird is both light and dark mixed together, it's soft and warm, coarse and delicate. If you are at all familiar with Keren Ann you are familiar with her delicate sounding voice that fuses well with Bardi who also has a smooth but deeper voice, which offsets Keren's surprisingly well. Moments in the album can get almost scary as the two vocalists explore ghost-like, trippy ranges with soft and disconcerting musical accompaniment. An overall emotional roller coaster, this album demands attention through its bittersweet lyrics, eerie vocals, and painfully delicate music. By digressing into a mellower area of the indie-pop sub-genre Lady & Bird explore a level of intensity that tends to be ignored.
You can listen to tracks from the album at the band's myspace page:
What a lot of people don't realize about Of Montreal is that the group started out as a pseudo-solo project of Kevin Barnes. For the first couple of albums, Barnes was clearly the key songwriter, and his band's lineup was constantly changing. Although the members rotated, Barnes kept his sound pretty steady for the first seven or eight years of his musical career: Of Montreal's tunes were the bedroom recording versions of the Beach Boys gone twee.
And then Satanic Panic In the Attic rolled around in 2004 and [sort of] surprised everyone. The record was solid and had much more of a focus on production than the previous efforts. And there were more traces of ... dance on the thing! That made everyone excited for a while.
2005's Sunlandic Twins was a let down. Barnes and his band mates took the dance thing too far and made the songs too glossy for their own good. They were boring in the most astounding and flashy way conceivable.
Next year's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer looks like it too will be disappointing. Barnes' voice has gotten loopier and goofier, psych guitar melodies are increasingly being replaced by predictable pop riffs, and potentially interesting bridges and choruses are washed away in a sea of distortion and echo. Too much, I say.
But judge for yourself ... "She's A Rejector" is the best song from the forthcoming release. Revel in it's mediocrity.