Kirkendahl Voyd describes its new album as “Salt-N-Pepa meets Link Wray and Prodigy.” That description sounds awful, but trust me: It doesn’t begin to prepare you.
Having garnered radio play on Dr. Demento and The Hour of Slack, the Cleveland trio knows its freak-out music. Unfortunately, with cheesy techno, excessive rock guitar, aimless genre-hopping, and stupid samples, Stung constitutes the kind of freak-out music reserved for aficionados of the brown acid.
The band’s so whacked, its cover of Tchaikovsky’s “Arabian Dance” is actually a note-for-note rip-off of Prodigy’s “Diesel Power” sans Kool Keith’s rhymes. The only rapping on Stung is of the nursery rhyme and rap-rock varieties: “Go Go Ga Ga” and “Sadistic Babysitta,” respectively.
The band’s best moments are when its female vocalists take over –“Novacain Kiss,” for example. But then it’s back to drivel that would serve as the perfect interrogation tool for torturers at Guantanamo.
This article appears in Jul 25-31, 2007.