CSS ‎– Cansei De Ser Sexy CD

CSS plays rudimentary punk bashers with disco hi-hats and trebly amped-up chanting and buzzing keyboards and surf-guitar twangs and simplistic structures and absolutely no hints at subtlety, ever.

The vocals are generally chirpy and terrible. With her broken English and thick accent, singer Lovefoxxx doesn't sound all that far off from electroclash's whole fake-German shtick, but at least her accent is real. It's hard to hear her words sometimes, but it's always easy to hear her snotty half-sarcasm, her come-ons more sneered than purred ("I know how you're doing by looking at your pants/ And this is how we call it a comeback"). And she's not above biting the lyrics of better bands in painfully obvious ways (the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Art Star" on "Art Bitch," Mu's "Paris Hilton" on "Meeting Paris Hilton"). The band likes its production tinny, all squeaky synths and ugly, damaged guitars, which occasionally leads to deeply shitty experiments like the unlistenable Casio-polka lope of "Alcohol". CSS's whole fast-and-cheap aesthetic is more fun to think about than to actually hear; more often than not, their songs end up sounding like the crappy filler tracks from the first Le Tigre album.

Still, CSS has a few great little tricks in its arsenal. When they stop arching their eyebrows and put some work into doing time-tested pop stuff, they can be great

Label: Sub Pop

Country: US

Media Condition: Near Mint (NM or M-)
Sleeve Condition: Near Mint (NM or M-)