There's retro, which is, y'know, cool but not at the same time. Then there's nostalgia, which means if you weren't cool before you can pretend that you were. Then there's pointless retreading of all-too familiar themes and images for the sake of, well, no one in particular. Sex Objects is the latter.
Everything about The Briefs's spiky pop-punk (old school, I'm not talking Mest) seems so hideously affected, to the point where you can't take a song like 'Destroy The USA' seriously simply because it's on the same album as a song as astonishingly directionless as 'Killed By Ants'. And any band short-sighted enough to think that shouting “Destroy the USA, hey hey!” has a social value of anything more than precisely fuck-all is just not really worth bothering with in the first place.
There's nothing on Sex Objects that merits a second listen. The oh-so-intelligent guitar squeals on 'Ephedrine Blue' get boring by the first chorus and the lack of energy throughout the album is startling for a band that seems to make all the right noises regarding having the right image but seems chronically unable to shift out of neutral. Just when 'No More Presidents' threatens to buck the trend and not be a dully repetitive exercise in gang vocals and unimaginative guitars it falls into the most predictable structure ever and you get the sense that somewhere a child is weeping at the sheer humanity of it all.
Seriously, don't buy this. It's balls. Don't listen to the fans that will inevitably leave their response by saying “They rule!” because frankly, The Briefs couldn't find a tune in a million Beatles albums.
Ben
www.thebriefs.com
www.byorecords.com
