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Panda Riot, She Dares All Things

reviewed by hiram lucke

I’ve actually been listening to this off and on for the last couple of months and what I’m about to say may seem a little harsh, but it’s accurate: Panda Riot sounds like a My Bloody Valentine demo. And it's not like The Swirlies used to do, adding some stoned 4-track weirdness and harsh noise to the stew. And it's not quite what Lush would do, although a lot of the backwards delay of the guitars does sound a little more like Lush's first album. But just MBV. The love of MBV has so totally consumed Panda Riot that even the cover photo for their album She Dares All Things is an oversaturated, blurry photo of a woman. So, yeah, it's a definite genre album. That genre prevalent in the early 90s in which people looked at the ground a lot. Or at their shoes as they stomped on their distortion pedals....

That said, it’s also pretty damn good, which is why I keep coming back to it. The band have used the trance-y guitars and dance-y drum machines of “Soon” and the Glider EP and created a bedroom world of reverb and shifting ground. Started as a soundtrack project by Rebecca Scott and Brian Cook (later adding Justin Cheng on bass), the band plays the gauzy and distorted soundscapes familiar to fans of The Swirlies, Lush, and MBV (of course) as Scott breathes each syllable into the microphone. The sampler based opener "White Elephants" has "oohs" blipping around while the guitars come in on a familiar chord progression. "Art School Girls of Doom" not only is great because of it's title, but because it slows down the formula and moves it back into it's Cocteau Twins roots for the first quarter.

She Dares All Things, despite causing me to contemplate the nature of homage vs. totally copping someone's else, sits comfortably within the genre and although it never transcends it (not that I believe Panda Riot wants to), it is one of the better nugaze efforts that I've heard in the last few months. I'm going to go ponder my using the term "nugaze" now.


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