Mixing garage, folk, punk, metal, Kurt Weill, noise, glam and danzon with shamelessly inappropriate harmonies, the music is a disorienting hybrid of chaos and hooks. Ugly to bombastic to melodramatic to banjo-picking to spastic to Sabbath on a trombone. The lyrics veer between heartfelt little stories about twisted losers to self indulgent delusions of grandeur. Alice Donut has made a career of making the wrong music at the wrong time for the wrong people and somehow making it, oddly, right.In 1996, Alice Donut played their 1000th show to a packed house in London, then went, exhausted, back to NYC and called it quits. In 2003, the band re-emerged re-energized.Having previously resisted his bandmates' pleas to reform, vocalist Tomas Antona finally relented and Alice Donut released the first of their promised trilogy of reunion albums. And while the opening "Kiss Me" comes on like an ambiguous wave to both fans and the music industry ("Did you miss me?/ I didn't think of you at all"), it's hard to believe that Antona isn't enjoying himself--indeed it's the vocals that are the focus, and they're as good as ever for those who revel in his scratched, earthy tones.The songs throughout are pure Donut, not as lyrically interesting as anything off "Revenge Fantasies of the Impotent", but nowhere near the puerile as the work of "Donut Comes Alive". Rather, it's pitched in between, with the band sounding meaty and tight, despite Michael Jung shouldering all the guitar duties (both David Giffen and Richard Marshall declined), and the band show off their prowess on the highlight "Helsinki". Not an album for the uninitiated, this is still a strong release....you can buy a copy here: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Iron-Man-Shop
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