Prizzy Prizzy Please

Despite treading the deep waters of self-important hipster rock, Prizzy Prizzy Please has managed to carve a musical niche with the power of zebra snack cakes, slam dunks, and piles of beer-soaked confetti. Their self-titled, debut release is loud, contagious laughter in the quiet mass of would-be artsy rock albums. Singer/saxophonist Mark Pallman's voice shifts between maniacal shouting and ultraviolet falsetto as he sings songs of the patently absurd: flea infestations, breaking the Guinness world record for most t-shirts worn at one time, and buying drill bits from crack addicts. The band blames their collective obsession with Animal Planet for encouraging songs about large flocks of woodpeckers, disaster monkeys, and police officers who happen to be dinosaurs. Though one might assume music for such lyrics would be written with a 13-key battery-operated toy piano, Pallman's words turn out to be perfectly suited to this chugging four-piece engine of dancey instrumental prowess.    Track by track, Prizzy Prizzy Please showcases chainsawing metallic keyboard lines, generously frosted with saxophone blasts running atop a ballistic drum and bass section. Songs hit heavy and quick with very little pause for breath, adequately emulating the raucous excitement of PPP's live performance. The clever instrumentation is a ferocious jubilee, managing to seamlessly meld stadium rock and garage punk inside the cast of traditional pop song structures. In short, this album is a gold mine of anthemic melodies that you'll spend the next 25 minutes listening to, but the next 25 years humming to.