Rosa Mota – Bionic – Review

Rosa Mota

Bionic (Mute)
by Nik Rainey

A great band but a critic’s nightmare – you can’t get a grip on it for more than a song at a time (and often not that often). One hot minute, it’s incantantory punk as if sung by (English punk dude’s name to come) and Kate Pierson (or maybe Cindy Wilson – I can never tell); the next, it’s string-mopped U.K. hee-hey with a sickly-sweet Pixie-sticky bassline. Exuberant and claustrophobic at once, like a mental patient playing out his manic state against the walls of a refurbished Victorian nuthouse’s smallest padded pad, a state e exacerbated by the well-marbled raw meat of (here’s a surprise) Steve Albini’s production. Velveteen strips laid across misbegotten mooning, Goth that sez gosh, a trowel stripping cement from sonic masonry and letting the gray clots fall where they may over the lost highway, hardening to form speedbumps that make this a bumpy clatterphonic joyride… See what I mean? Such is the kind of imprecise folderoleo that Rosa Mota lays atop my bagel. It ain’t always easy, people. Will “buy it” suffice?