The Nevada Bachelors

Carrots & So On (Yeti)
by Jamie Kiffel

At the risk of being sued for malpractice, I diagnose The Nevada Bachelors as Placebo on Prozac. With mouthfuls of zipspeed lyrics, stutter-paced drums, and nervously talkative, tight-strung guitars, Carrots & So On plays like the squiggly, indecipherable poetry of a prescription. Like a doctor’s penmanship, the effect is fast, insistent, and gets the drug in hand in spite of apparently illegible verbiage. The prescription, in this case, is for some intense upper with the side effects of jumpiness, racing heartbeat, excitability (hand claps) and sudden bursts of energy (falsetto exclamations of “ooh!”). Almost certainly misheard lyrics include “This is a rash of bad hash” in “The Rashons;” “Fifty-four-year-old Beatle enjoys standing and growing his grass” in “Wild Boar Problem,” and “Ain’t you Spanish scenesters enigmafied?” in “White Caps,” yielding many pleasurable minutes of post-modernist popping, sans pills. Tenor harmonies and massive stress on the E-string put your tweeters to the test. This may need its own drug rep.
(Popllama 5508 35th NE Seattle, WA 98105)