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OK, everybody loves the Pixies, this is a given. Surfer Rosa, Doolittle, Trompe le Monde, they're all classic alternative albums that achieved legendary status early on and will continue to thrive in our hearts and minds until the end of days. The combo of their quirky songs, lush instrumentals and the play between the dual vocals of Black Francis and Kim Deal all came together to create a perfect combo.


But now lets look at things a bit differently. Let's play a little bit of fun with parallel universes - what if the Pixies had not been an artsy fartsy bunch of East Coast intellectuals that catered to the college alt-rock set, but had instead been a bunch of west coast garage punks with all the same talents, but an entirely different set of influences and a higher propensity to rev things up. Would it work? Would it be better?

On its face, this may seem like a pointless exercise, except that there is an answer. We just have to look to the existence of Orange County's The Lovely Bad Things to answer that question.

Like a rawer version of the Pixies, this foursome (composed of brothers Brayden and Camron Ward, Tim Hatch and Lauren Curtius) have a sound reminiscent of the Pixies that rides the line between eerily similar and crazily uncanny, primarily due to the band's boy/girl vocal interchange, but to simply write the band off as a Pixies clone before calling it a night would be to shortchange this band immensely, as their full-length debut The Late Great Whatever is loaded with a sound much more diverse than the easy route of Pixi-fying them.

Opening with "Hear or Anywhere," the band grabs hold with an infectious surf-soaked garage sounds that whirls about with infectious pop hooks before descending into some lush instrumentals that are buried in fuzz, along with a bit of Sonic Youth-inspired musical chaos. And this is just the depth of the initial track.

From there, the band bounds around the spectrum. "Fried Eyes" is one of those tracks that sound too much like a Pixies tribute to not make the comparison, with Black and Deal-sounding interplay and some booming music, but it plows into "Maybe I Know," a jittery girl punk track with plenty of fuzzed out sound. It's followed up by the pure hook-fueled punk rock of "Kessel Run" (one of two Star Wars references to grace the tracks of the album, with the other being "Darth Lauren," another punk thumper with bopping vocals).

There's a bit of jangly Minutemen-inspired punk that descends into carefully orchestrated organized chaos on “Randall the Savage” (a Macho Man reference? You better believe it, brother!), an overly-caffeinated track that makes my hands shake just thinking of it, and some serious surf styled guitar combined with elements of the Wipers on "Styx and Branches." It's musically all over the place, with a liberal amount of fuzzed out lo-fi padding to keep it from bouncing too far out of control.

A Bigfoot on the cover, along with wrestling and Star Wars references, give the band massive amounts of geek cred, while their actions give them piles of DIY cred. The band recently made it all the way to the world-famous Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona, Spain, where they successfully funded their trip through a combination of crowdfunding using IndieGoGo and passing the hat at house shows. And with that kind of determination, it's evident that their slacker-styled punk rock interpretation of the Pixies East Coast sound is slackerly in sound only, and that The Late Great Whatever is the product of determination, solid band chemistry and a liberal supply of geeky inspiration.

Release Date: February 26, 2013

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Free MP3 Download: Lovely Bad Things - "Fried Eyes"

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