Mi6
Lunchbox (Kung Fu)
by Morgan Coe
Like good needs evil, like light needs darkness, like God needs Burzum, I need this album. Mi6 makes my Screeching Weasel records sound more soulful, my Strung Out records sound more tight and musical, and someone else’s Blink 182 records sound more witty and irreverent. Lowest-common-denominator pop-punk: Mix vapid lyrics about being a “loser” with up-tempo major key power chords, sprinkle liberally with facile melodic guitar riffs and “solos,” fluff half-heartedly and let sit until a slot opens up on the Warp Tour second stage.
To be fair to the boys, they do have the good sense (or dumb luck?) to steal from a few slightly less obvious sources. “Lezbian Girlfriends” (sic) is essentially a rewrite of Reel Big Fish’s 1996 non-classic “She Has A Girlfriend Now,” but where the ‘Fish were able to scrape up a real girl to help sing theirs, Mi6’s take comes off as the one dirty song on every Blink 182 record, without the swearing. And on top of that, their “I wish I could be a lezbian (sic) like you” ending is completely redundant in light of Screeching Weasel’s much better “I Wanna Be A Homosexual,” not to mention Sloppy Seconds’ brilliant “I Don’t Wanna Be A Homosexual.” On the other hand, “Mojo,” a clunky knockoff of “88 Lines About 44 Women” (by the Nails – I had time to look it up before they finished), paints a poignant but chilling picture of young mall punks in love.
Meanwhile, Scott Radinsky signed a contract with the Cleveland Indians last September. If his recent elbow surgery doesn’t work out, you can bet he’ll be suing Mi6 for all they’re worth, because they plundered his second album with Ten Foot Pole (Rev). For starters, Scott’s unique English-by-way-of-Brooklyn diction is all over the record, and then there’s “RX7”: Not only is the music directly lifted from the ‘Pole’s “Closer To Gray” (down to the bass intro), the old broken-down-car-as-metaphor-for-life shtick is directly lifted from, like, every song written since 1955.
In closing, I think this quote from their own “Jeff Brown” speaks more clearly than I ever could: “You said so many bad things about me/I think you’re just musically uninclined/& your (sic) still spreading it around, & you keep writing it all down/& I’ll find you with your review & I’ll make you apologize to me/just say you’re sorry, for your story, I don’t think that it was very fair of you/you Jeff Brown’d me.” Consider yourselves emphatically “Jeff Browned,” whatever the fuck that means.
(PO Box 38009 Hollywood, CA 90038)
