Listening to Plushgun's full-length debut is a little like unearthing a time capsule from the late ’90s. Not the post-grunge, Limp Bizkit, and Creed late ’90s; think the Eiffel 65 and Vengaboys late ’90s. Chirpy, staccato synth pulsing in time with a pounding bass drum, some tinkling xylophone effects, and maybe an electronic wash manipulated to sound like strings for dramatic effect in the ballads, and presto: you've got every pre-millennial club hit fit to play at a Catholic school homecoming dance. This is good news for those of us who have burned out our copies of Aquarium from overplay. The rest of the world, however, might wonder if it's not too late to throw some fresh dirt over this relic and pretend we never found it.
Of the 10 tracks that make up Pins and Panzers, one-half have been repackaged from Plushgun's 2008 EPs. Singer and songwriter Daniel Ingala manages to couple warm, ecstasy-drenched melodies with insufferably earnest adolescent lyrics. The result sounds like a fragment from an alternate 2001, where Joel Madden assumed vocal duties for ATC. Like all popular trance/Europop hits from the turn of the century, Plushgun's music has a way of lodging itself in the listener's head and clinging with all the tenacity of a wood tick, thus insuring that even if you don't hate the songs immediately upon first encounter, you will surely hate them after some hours of continuously humming the chorus to “Dancing in a Minefield.”
Add to Ingala's sins a rather obnoxious habit of name-dropping. Referring to other bands in your work, either through cribbing a riff or through declarations like “From our old abandoned cars, we'll blast The Clash out,” is a little dangerous. You always run the risk of reminding your audience what they would rather be listening to. Ingala's desire to dance with The Talking Heads (“A Crush to Pass the Time”) or to walk the line like Johnny Cash (“Just Impolite”) does not shore up any additional credibility for him as an artist; it only tells me that he listens to much better music than he creates.
This need to name-check other musicians points to a larger problem that I have with Plushgun: the band's desire to hang out with the cool kids. Promoting themselves (as they do on their website) as a New Wave band seems disingenuous when their sound clearly owes a greater debt to Aqua than it does to New Order, and the fact that they combine live instrumentation with electronics doesn't change that. Furthermore, I'm not sure about Daniel Ingala's age, but I can tell from looking at his MySpace photos that he's way too fucking old to be singing songs about high school.
The thing is, I can totally see this band becoming tomorrow's one-hit wonder. Their marriage of Eurotrash beats to sloppy teenage sentimentality is just melodramatic enough to win the affection of the younger set. Unfortunately, Plushgun doesn't have a whole lot to say to anyone over the legal drinking age. If you've already lived through the summer when “Barbie Girl” was the hottest thing since “The Macarena,” and you feel that once was enough, you'd be advised to leave Pins and Panzers on the shelf.
1. Dancing in a Minefield
2. How We Roll
3. Just Impolite
4. A Crush to Pass the Time
5. The Dark in You
6. Let Me Kiss You Now (and I'll Fade Away)
7. Union Pool
8. 14 Candles
9. Without a Light
10. An Aria
More about: Plushgun
