MARMOSET
Record in Red (Secretly Canadian)
Reviewed by Holly Day

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Marmoset is one of those bands that rock critics everywhere will claim/are claiming excitedly (and repeatedly) as their own discovery, just because they're so amazing that they're just doomed to be considered important and seminal and classic twenty years from now. Of course, that's ridiculous, because despite their nonexistent commercial radio play and exclusion from the Grammy's, cool people like Jonathan Richman still ask them to open for him, and really, can anybody or anything really be discovered? And what is self-discovery, exactly? These things bother me this morning.

Anyway, Marmoset themselves are just a wonderful band. They occupy multiple places on the musical spectrum, with a retro sound like Johnny Thunders and the sleazy cool early Stones stuff on one hand, and something spacey and cool and echoey and futuristic on the other which takes their otherwise retro sound and pushes it beyond being just that. Lyrically, the songs find a place between abstract children's songs and burlesque music for really bad girls and low budget drag queens, like Lewis Carroll staggering through an acid trip, or maybe just how he'd normally sound if he had fronted a band. Musically, the guitars are so crisp and so beautiful, the vocals are perfect, and the bass lines are just plain haunted.

© 2002 - Holly Day