Manda and the Marbles

Angels with Dirty Faces (Addison)
by Ewan Wadharmi

I know everyone is looking for the next No Doubt, and I ignored Manda‘s first album, More Seduction, hoping they would go away. Still, somehow, someone let them make another one. Well, since they drew first blood, I must protect the public. They should really just be called Manda, since it’s got no fucking marbles. The album is perfect. Absolutely flawless, over-produced, cream-filled sweetness, like eating both twinkies… twice. We can’t escape the John Hughes references, they’ve got a song called “Say Anything,” for God’s sake. For covering The Avengers’ “Cheap Tragedies,” they should be struck dead as though they’d touched the Ark of the Covenant. We get what they’re trying to do with the Go-Go’s, Blondie, Waitresses new-wave girl pop. Hopefully, Manda will abandon her band to make records full of dance beats and marching bands, appearing on MTV awards shows and the radio, where I will never run across her again, and her spurned bandmates will angrily create some visceral form of payback rock that we can all enjoy.
(www.addisonrecords.com)