I've always been tempted to join the "We Listen To The Bands With '!' In Their Title" group on Last.fm. Not surprisingly, pride of place on this group's connections list goes to !!!
We are advised that the Brooklyn band's name can be pronounced as any three short repetitive sounds like powpopow, uhuhuh although to save the headache of where to locate them in record stores and online resources they've settled on chkchkchk .
So for the band name, file and find under C, but then comes the challenge of where to locate their sound.. If there was a genre for soul-punk-funk-disco-jazz-dub they'd be no problem and !!! would head up this category too. Based on their previous two albums - !!! (2001) and Louden Up Now (2004) punk-funk has been the media tag of convenience but this is so reductive as to be meaningless. You might just as well create a genre for the punctuationally challenged for all it tells you about the music.
I must confess that, with their slap bass dance orientated rhythms, !!! are a band I'd ordinarily go out of my way to avoid but the grooves on this album are so infectious and irresistible that even a resolutely non-dancing fool like myself was tapping my toe and 'getting on down'.
The title track is an innocuous enough lead in until a great twang hook grabs the attention and after this we are launched into the rat-a-rat hey-ho beats of the marvellously titled 'All My Heroes Are Weirdoes'.
The sequencing on this album is spot on and these opening two tracks perfectly prepare the ground for the album's first killer punch - Must Be The Moon. Producer Justin Van Der Volgen's bass line is to die for and the track is blessed with a relentless groove that just builds and builds. Nic Offer's lyrics about a drunken late night liaison are appropriately sleazy ("She said love is love but a fuck is what it is") but its the layering of sound that makes this so great - as with something like Talking Heads 'Born Under Punches' it hooks you in so you don't want the beat to let up.
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On any lesser album it would be downhill from here on in but this being the real deal there's plenty more highlights still in store. There's the sleepy spaced out Sly Stone-type exhortations to "put your ass together" on A New Name and another mega-groove of Heart Of Hearts provides the album's obvious single.
Sweet Life has a Motown intro and sounds disconcertingly like The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, while The Yadness's glitter band meets Scissor Scissors on heat is perhaps the best example of !!!'s melting pot sound.
Their knack of stirring so many different styles into the mix without ever sounding cluttered works so well that by the penultimate two tracks (Bend Over Beethoven and Break In Case Of Anything) !!!'s it all begins to sound effortless. Only on the final track (Infiniford) do they ease off the pedal with a slow chill out soul ballad. Lyrically, this may not be so profound ("Nothing's gonna change nothing") but at this point in proceedings, who cares?!
This is a brilliant, sexy album that fires on all cylinders and works on every level.
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