Thought this was worth posting -- review of Jr Sr in NY Times today:
November 4, 2003
POP REVIEW | JUNIOR SENIOR
Novelties That Stick in the Craw of Your Mind
By KELEFA SANNEH
The best novelty hits inspire instant nostalgia. Listeners can look forward to the day when they'll look back and wonder how something so preposterous ever became popular. On Saturday night the bands behind two recent novelty hits came to the Bowery Ballroom.
Junior Senior, a duo from Denmark, broke through with "Move Your Feet," a disco throwback driven by chanted vocals and a gloriously fake horn section. "Move Your Feet" sounds like a fluke, but most of Junior Senior's debut album, "D-D-Don't Don't Stop the Beat" (Crunchy Frog/Atlantic), is just as good. The band's secondhand guitar riffs and hand-clapping breaks make nearly every song as clever and as catchy as a great television commercial.
The two halves of Junior Senior like to play up their differences. Junior is small, thin and elegant, whereas Senior plays the part of the ugly European, a big, voluble guy wearing a gold chain and an unsightly mustache. "This is about shaking your coconuts," he barked. Then they played, "Shake Your Coconuts," another potential novelty hit, with a call-and-response chorus: "Shake your coconuts (Coco-boys) Until the milk comes out (Coco-girls)."
The headlining band, Electric Six, tried harder to be funny, and succeeded less often. This band, from Detroit, first attracted fans with "Danger! High Voltage!," a disco-punk classic with vocals overheated enough to justify the exclamation points in the title. Unfortunately the band's debut album, "Fire" (XL), is mainly ham-fisted hard-rock parodies like "Naked Pictures (Of Your Mother)."
There is one exception, though: an irresistible novelty hit called "Gay Bar." The band's singer, Dick Valentine, has devoted himself to the pursuit of blitheness, so he shouts every lyric as if he had no idea what he's shouting about. That tendency serves him well on "Gay Bar," which begins with the world's worst pick-up line: "Girl, I wanna take you to a gay bar." For the next two minutes guitars bash out an idiotic riff, and the singer modifies his wish list to "Do you have any money?/ I want to spend all your money/ At the gay bar."
"Gay Bar" has inspired no less than three popular-music videos. An official video starring lots of underdressed Abraham Lincolns, an unsanctioned video featuring cats dressed as Vikings, and a parody in which President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain seem to lip-sync the lyrics. (You can watch this last video at
www.campchaos .com/othershows/video/03h.html.)
By comparison, the live version seemed a bit tame, and much of the rest of the set was downright tedious. Like Junior Senior, Electric Six should be happy to have scored one hit. But unlike Junior Senior, this band should also be satisfied.
