There are bands and when you hear them, there are people that come to mind and just thinking about it puts you off of it. “That band sounds so weird, its like they’re trying to be weird” you can hear yourself say the first time you put the record on. It's the kind of record where if you put it on, people are going to roll their eyes and now you are one of those guys, who listens to cooler than cool music, obscure music for the love of being obscure.You are now one of those guys who invites people over just to show off, and he’s wearing a button down coat, sitting on a stool at a vintage Tiki bar, his green chords pressed along the crease, his goatee perfectly in place, and his CD collection is made up for people cooler than you are: You know, record store clerks, book store employees in Manhattan, you get the idea. This kind of obscure to be obscure stuff is supposed to throw all but ten percent of listeners off track, but somehow the Ruby Suns Sea Lions never does.Ok, well not never, I saw our friend in one of the earlier songs on the record, sitting there in his vintage kitchen set, sipping on a not at all ironic cocktail, a big coconut tree on his glass. He’s the one with all of those shellaqued ‘78s, because they are so much cooler than vinyl. There are reasons for me feeling this way, the instrumentation is a little cutesy, there's more than a hint of let's raid the four year olds room for musical instruments and can Mary Poppins come over? And the ever popular and oh so indie we’ll have like fifteen people in our band, and they will all swap instruments.Music like this is hard to categorize. I mean how can one explain a sound that is so much of an amalgamation that hardly anyone but the most hardened rock critics and rock snobs will be able to discern? So maybe this record just for jaded hipsters, cool guys, girls that work for record label and never give you their phone numbers, no matter how many times you ask, and err, people that ride scooters and wear scarves.But skip past all that crap for a second. Isn’t that why you come here? To MOG I mean. You come here to read reviews by people that don’t pull that kind of shit. People that write about music and do it out of some love of said music?To dig into the music, after all, because that’s what you’ve come for, I will actually speak about the music. But a mere subject verb assessment won’t do the review justice, nor will giving my opinion. I tried that already, and what did you get out of it?So here it is, what it sounds like. Picture its a day,a hot day in the future, in the year 2044, it’s a metaphor, stick with me, it’s a hot day and you sit in front of your shop, a pawn shop. The air conditioning is on the rag, so you sit outside with your goddamn support socks, your favorite shorts and take a newspaper, the Times, it doesn’t matter, you're seventy years old and this shit pawn shop is all you have left, and you sit and you look out at all the customers that don’t show up.Then a marching band walks past. Imagine that you are trying to have a complete thought at this time, while the marching band walks, step by step. A car passes by, playing “Morning Sun” from the Ruby Suns Sea Lion album and it sounds like a song you heard from back in elementary school in the 1980s, they used to beat you up to that stuff,that Power Pop.Then a memory comes bubbling up, the first time you ever heard an ELO record, and you know in ELO there’s that voice that Jeff Lynne has that hits you, remember how you felt? The marching band is in full swing now, the tuba and the xylophones, and its so hot the street has waves, and so that reminds you of the ocean on that one summer before the divorce, and you just stared at that girl that couldn’t have been twenty and your wife was nag-nag-nagging in your ear the whole time, and there was luau music there, and poi that night. It sounds like that night, but only the memory of it, not the night itself. Mix that with the sound of a marching band and you might have an idea, you might be cool enough to imagine what it sounds like without walking away.Still in front of your shop you reach up and hold your arm into the sun, and the marching band is in between songs, and instruments are belting out stuff, themes from your youth, Sousa and Sonic Youth, and Pavement and every once in a while their instruments will gather around a melody and stay there, but only for a few bars.They haven’t moved for as long as you’ve been away, still in front of the store. You think you hear Ethel Merman’s on the radio somewhere, or maybe it’s the TV down on low inside, that commercial for the furniture store, that girl’s voice that always reminds you of Ethel Merman. But it’s the marching band, always the marching band.All afternoon you swim in your head, the memories arriving on cue, steady like on TV and delivered by an acid trip or nightmare. You try to concentrate, but the marching band still plays over everything, a band full of people that can play, but only when drunk, and never all at once. Some might call this record, this review a heat stroke, but with all of the disorientation of a heat stroke, there’s moments when it all comes together. And when it does, like in “Kenya Did It” it sounds like the Beach Boys finding oil in the South Pacific, each band member digging into the foundations of the earth to resurrect their sound until its disrupted. The songs aren’t so much songs but fragments, little half steps of memory buried down low in the mix. It swims, it haunts, and its completely different each time you hear it. You might not get it on the first listen, but it will haunt you until it comes, and when it does it will come on like a reverie outside a pawnshop on a hot summer’s afternoon in the year 2044, the memories of a seventy year old hitting you, all at once.Listen now before its too late.