ANY FRIEND OF GENGHIS TRON’S IS A FRIEND OF MINE, AND NATURALLY THAT INCLUDES GT’S FELLOW HOMETOWN HEROES PONY PANTS
Living in hepster Brooklyn, I am continually given access to some of the coolest new music in the world. At one point I even gave a rat’s ass. And being the only third of MetalSucks.yrmom that resides in Brooktown, USA (thus far), I do feel somewhat obligated to report on what the kkkkool kidz are listening to, but when a band so directly intersects with one of my fellow writer’s strongest predilections as of late, I have no freakin’ choice, right?
It was pushing 1:30 in the ultra-AM this past Friday when Dizzy Winnz and me, we stopped back by the Wingerschmidt Wing of the MetalSucks Mansion (aka the newly annointed Slam Palace) to take a brief pause from a nearby party and check out the MySpace tracks of Pony Pants, the next band that was to play at said nearby party, in order to decide whether we should return to said said party or move onward into the night towards more debaucherous venues. Once knee-deep into the plasma pit of PP’s miniscule hold on the intranut, I was struck by the listing for an upcoming show at which Pony Pants is to share the stage with super-sweet art-punk-psych-funk Brooklyn superstars Oneida (one of my very favorite [non-metal] bands I’ve experienced this side of the goddamn millenium) and our own Axl Rosenberg’s nocturnal emission for 2008, Genghis Tron.
It became clear pretty quickly that PP, like GT, is from Philly, and the GT remix on PP’s MySpace page cemented a clear friendship (or at least alignment) between the two bands. Before returning back to th’Palace, I had asked the guitar player setting up pedals what kind of music Pony Pants is, and he replied “electropunk…and metal.” “Oh”, I said — “awesome”. And fuckin’ hell, for any lover of fusing genres with ballz, that idea really is. When I actually listened to the tracks I thought they were okay (not amazing), but one definitely stood out to me and my already-crunked compatriot, and in our whiskey-fueled state, we indeed decided to go back to the party, and the right choice we had made — live, the band ripped it. I wouldn’t say they were extremely metallic, but the 2-guitar, thick bass, and female vocals backed by sequenced drum machine rhythms (i.e., no live drummer — just like, well, you know) made way for a heady, danceable combination of crunked-out beats, chunky, riff-heavy, syncopated wailing-lick guitars, and art-school/spazzed-out/trebly girl vocals. And it went over real well with the twenty or thirty excitable peeps who had hung out late enough to check these fuckers out.
Plus the band has an album from a couple years ago called Til Death Do Us Party, an obvious but still kinda-cool name that I for one never thought of. Kudos to Pony Pants for making the deep, dark trip to streel-level Bushwick, Brooklyn (apparantly just a few mere hours earlier it seemed bleak that the band would get it in gear and roll out to Crunksville, BK in time), and welcome to the family…
-KW
Visit Oneida on MySpace / Visit Oneida’s radical website
Visit Genghis Tron on MySpace / Read about Axl’s undying man-love for Genghis Tron’s forward-thinking, recently-released album Board Up The House, produced by Converge’s Kurt Ballou / Visit Genghis Tron’s website and buy that shiat
