BUNKY
Born to Be a Motorcycle
Asthmatic Kitty
· This San Diego band has been billed as The Flaming Lips meets The Muppets.
Quirky pop music can be a tough sell. Too much oddball instrumentation and you get labelled as a novelty act. Too many concept songs with goofy lyrics and you get dismissed as needy, crackpot losers. This could be why They Might Be Giants have had several decades in the spotlight with no one else ever rising to challenge them.
With the help of several San Diego hipsters, Bunky’s Emily Joyce and Rafter Roberts construct twisted pop gems that range from Nancy Sinatra rockers to ’50s radio ballads. However, when they do it they employ a hyperactive horn section and do a bit of squealing. This makes for some fantastic two-minute indie-rock blowouts, more than a mitt full of singalong choruses and a few songs that are almost unlistenable. With Bunky you have to take the good with the bad. When they hit they hit hard; when they miss, at least they do it in style. "Gotta Pee" mixes fairy vocals, xylophone and room-clearing white noise, resulting in the aural equivalent of a car accident. It’s disastrous but you can’t help but pay attention. You gotta hand it to Bunky, Born to Be a Motorcycle is part pop brilliance, part stylish failure – and you couldn’t possibly have one without the other.
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