David McAtee
City Times
Fans of pre-disco era glam rock will love the indulgent falsetto of Louis XIV’s latest release “Slick Dogs and Ponies” on Atlantic Records.
The band hit it big with the release of “The Best Little Secrets Are Kept” in 2004. The quartet’s sound has dropped into darker minor note territory, with tragic party tunes and singalongs about stalking, betrayal, mindless consumption, and an obsessive scenester named Tina. Each song stands pretty cloistered from each other on the album, joined together only by the slick well-balanced production and the thumping bass drum. Dogs and Ponies provides a great disc to throw your fist out the car window to on the way to a party on a Friday, so long as you can get past the squeaking whine of the vocal track on each song, replete with fake British accent in some places. Stand out songs include the aircraft metaphor heavy ballad ‘Air Traffic Control’, which comes early on the disc, the ‘beware, this could happen to you’ fable of ‘Tina’, and comedown weeper ‘Hopesick’.
Special thanks to Heather and all the fine folks at M-Theory Records in Mission Hills. For more information, visit www.mtheorymusic.com or check out the store.
** David McAtee is City Times’ arts and photography editor
