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Hooray for nerd rock! How nerdy are The Revolutionary Hydra? They out-nerd me by miles, and I'm pretty dang nerdy!
"The PEEFs" (acronym: Pilot Engineer Expeditionary Force) is a pseudo-concept album with recurring lyrical threads involving Sputnik-era sci-fi themes (as borne out by the packaging design) and satirical grad-schoolery. These are guys who are not afraid to write dorky rhymes about obscure French academics ("Queneau you know was so colloquial and vocal, and mathematically quite local") or mention things like graphic novels or make terrible puns about robots "jumping chip". So nerdy!
Musically it's mostly fairly mellow and mid-tempo with languid vocals and some interesting experimental bits and effects and such (your painfully obvious point of reference is Pavement). Contrarily though, the lead-off track "William Wizard Cauliflower" is a blazing rocker and a total old-school indie rock style hit (I have observed that the "indie rock" label seems to be applied pretty consistently to these guys), and it has a different lyrical angle as well--if I may venture, it seems to be about the spiritual undercurrent of an inner-tubing mishap. The following tracks keep up the energy pretty well and I have to say that most of my favorite tracks are in the first half of the album--they have good hooks and the longer ones are structured interestingly and there are neat moments like the vocals trading off mid-word for one heavily-reverbed falsetto syllable. Since these guys are hometown friends-of-friends I might have a slight bias, but regardless, gosh, there's just so much here that I'm predisposed to like. And like it I do. (mike.08.04)
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