Pink Lady Monster

Denver CO’s Pink Lady Monster concoct a funhouse of sound on their six-song album Psychic Antennae and a Tinsel Heart. Each song is full of twists and turns, reflections and refractions, delighting and destabilizing the listener with sensory overload and sneaky juxtapositions. To call these six offerings “songs” is slightly misleading: each one travels quite a distance in a short amount of time, rendering them more like movements – and much in the structures, melodies, and performances suggest similarly jazzy concepts. But Pink Lady Monster keeps traditional pop tropes at arm’s length: far enough they don’t get sucked into cliché, but close enough to snare familiarity at will. Some of the most pleasing moments of this album are when the band drops into a tight melody just when it feels like they’re about to devolve into chaos.

 

Just about every musical decision Pink Lady Monster makes is bold: jarring dynamics, odd key changes, sudden tempo shifts, peculiar instrumentation, and experimental sounds abound. But this is not a “throw it at the wall” style affair—there is intentionality and care infusing every choice. Take the intro of “Sigmund Saunter,” which pairs rapid-fire drum fills with delicate guitar plinkery, layered over a schmaltzy sax that somehow lands halfway between Coltrane and Rafferty. This murky sonic surface crystalizes seamlessly after forty seconds into a pocket-heavy groove. On the sanguine closer “Spiderweb,” a vulnerable vocal delivery and gentle guitar accompaniment struggle atop an eerie ambient backdrop, refusing the listener a calming coda to the album. The defining and most consistent feature of the band’s sound are the vocals, which are sung in turn with confidence, lethargy, charm, acid, twee, and fragility, mimicking and perfectly encapsulating the serpentine moods of the music. The vocals are almost always perfectly aligned tonally and rhythmically with the instrumentation, which is no small feat given how complex the tones and rhythms of these “songs” can be.

 

Pushing boundaries in music can often be rewarding merely for the revelations a broken form can display: the beauty of a shattered window, or the pattern of mud cracks in a dried lake bottom. But to shatter and marvel is one thing; to concoct patterns that emulate the structures of chaos is quite another. Pink Lady Monster might not make a sound everyone enjoys, but no one can deny that they make their sound. This is undeniably intentional and unique music made by a group of musicians with mastery of their instruments and deep knowledge of their craft.  Pink Lady Monster is doing the brave work of pushing listeners beyond their comfort zones until we’re able to steal glimpses of a parallel world: fragmented but familiar, like a reflection in a shattered window.