Egypt Central "White Rabbit"

(New Ocean) I looked at the photo of these guys and put this in the disc drive thinking I was in for some miserable noise, then I was kind of shocked, because right off the bat they were making challenging, non-commercial, unusual musical decisions. Then it just got better and better and I began to re-access my preconceptions...just because these guys might have mook-ish, absurd hair and a predilection for alt-rock glamour boy posing doesn't mean they can't make genuinely good, smart, off-kilter music. Then the second song sounded downright brilliant...and kind of familiar, so I got suspicious. It turns out my itunes was playing the A-Frames from my library for some reason while showing the tracks for Egypt Central. After switching over the EC my prejudices were beyond justified. Simply awful, worse than their hair! I hope they are at least of Egyptian heritage, so that they don't have an outright awful name on top of the awful music. The moral...listen to vinyl, your record player never tricks you (though I did once play a children's 45 about Barbie at 33 and was baffled and disturbed that she sounded like a chain smoking cancer patient, so that was sort of a trick).