So I Had To Shoot Him – Alpha Males & Popular Girls
So I Had To Shoot Him – Alpha Males & Popular Girls / 2005 Crucial Blast / 10 Tracks / http://www.soihadtoshoothim.com / http://www.crucialblast.net / Reviewed 15 January 2006 To say that “Alpha Males & Popular Girls” starts out oddly is a major understatement. The lead vocals come through in a very poppy vein (almost in the way of the strung-out goth rock of the late eighties), while the instrumentation comes into view as purveyors of a Locust / Lightening Bolt type of noise rock. The use of multiple layers of vocals during the first track gives the song yet another dimension and really will give listeners a high replay value; one simply is not able to go and hear everything that So I Had To Shoot Him is doing during this track. However odd it may seem, Libby’s vocals during the beginning of “Another Roman E Clef by Hart Bochner” almost have a Sheryl Crow type of sound; this sound continue the same interesting relationship with the much more noisy and intense instrumentation that is backing it. So I Had To Shoot Him have to be given a few style points for being (to my knowledge) the only purveyors of this music style; this is even more impressive considering that the band still comes up with a very accessible sound. This sound really seems to put them in the Men’s Recovery Camp type of noise, instead of the more hardcore-based noise that has been detrimentally called technocore. The band does not tend to fall into the extremely short output of bands like Some Girls, either; the aforementioned “Another Roman…” really acting as par for the course at a touch over four minutes. With So I Had To Shoot Him coming up with enough material to fill a longer track (and a fairly long disc, at about forty minutes), there is no doubt that their name will be one that gets larger as the year pass. “Cadavertising” is an example of what the B-52s would sound like if they came about twenty years later; the sheer fury of the band pushes the dual vocals that dominate the track into bold new directions. Of all the tracks on “Alpha Males & Popular Girls”, “John Cleese and the Fountain of Youth” is the one track that individuals could conceivably hear on radio; the band draws back considerably during the track to something that approximates eighties metal (pre-hair band) while the vocals strive for dominance throughout the track. Top Tracks: Another Roman E Clef by Hart Bochner, Cadavertising Rating: 6.8/10

[JMcQ]