Just as many now reasonably well-adjusted high school misfits agonize over how few wrong turns their lives would have needed to have taken over the years in order to have sent them skidding down the vocational path of a psycho school shooter, one can’t help but lose sleep imagining a nightmarish alternate existence where, by virtue of a handful of unfortunate events, HOLLY TRASTI wound up as a cute and forgettable singer-songwriter type instead of her current role as Queen of the Green Bay Scene. Dodging that particular bullet like nobody’s business, the NICE LIONS lunge out of the starting gate like the three happiest dogs in a rock’n’roll greyhound race, with the aforementioned Ms. Trasti’s geek-girl brilliance and hot nerd guitar nipping at the mechanical rabbit’s heels at the paddock turn. On ‘Nom de Plume’—an upbeat ditty that would have sounded not unwelcome on the first Pretenders album—Holly’s insouciant voice flickers from semi-sultry grade-school-girl-playing-dress-up soul to chirpy balloon squeakiness and back again, whilst the rhythm section of NICK MARCANTONIO and PRESTON ELY dapperly hammers away like Foxton and Buckler circa the fourth or fifth Jam album. The flip side, ‘No Future,’ is a jangling three-chord pounder that has me dancing the same fresh moves i like to lay down during ‘The Clap-Pat Song’ by Shirley Ellis, but minus all the clapping and patting. And, for this, society should be most grateful."—Rev. Norb Rozek. 350 copies on mixed colored vinyl.
