He Has The Technology

The WPP

(Satellite City)

It’s hard to find fault with the underground credentials of Vancouver-based punks The WPP. Vocal duties osciallate between all four members, who all play instruments as well, smashing any notions of rock deityhood. To top it off, their most recent album, He Has the Technology, was written in an actual basement and put out by the obscure Hollywood label Satellite City. Punk rock, indeed.

The band has opened for the likes of Fugazi, Blood Brothers and Les Savy Fav, and while listening to the album it seems as though those more renowned bands may have lent the WPP more than guitar picks and groupies. But even with such a pedigree, the ironic demeanor and chronically short attention span of He Has the Technology may leave some listeners hoping for a more mature sophomore LP.

The song titles on the album encompass the full range of wordwankery, from tonguetwisters like “She Swam To Sweden” to the vaguely tautological “I Was Raised A Gunfighter By A Family Of Gunfighters.” The standout track in terms of titular pretension has to be the opener, which has been dubbed with the Dillinger Four-esque whopper “Let’s See A Little Less Standing Around And A Little More Jumping Out Of Cakes.” This trend would be tolerable, and even amusing, if it was restricted to the track names, but similar immaturity can be traced running through the lyrics and song structures of the album. Exciting musical ideas are toyed with on some of the songs, but the lack of balance can make for frustrating listening. “Seriously, Get A Towel” features a deadpan recitation of dinosaur names and a sophomoric title. Even “Satan Says,” one of the album’s highlights, manages to sound paradoxically similar to that haunting song from Home Alone sloppily sung in a round by a hardcore audience, fists pumping up toward an ornate Christmas tree on stage.

Though He has the Technology is woefully inconsistent and often painfully tongue-in-cheek (the cell-phone ring on “Bikini Infinity ‘The Epic Journey To The Mother Land’” is intolerable), repeated plays reveal an inner core of solid song writing and sincere emotion under the ADDcore finish. Although the band will undoubtedly benefit from a more introspective focus, there are points on the album where all that seems to matter (to paraphrase a series of punk legends before them) is that the WPP are young, loud and Canadian.

—Will B. Payne

How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb

U2

(Interscope Records)

U2’s relevance may never diminish. We all gave up somewhere around Achtung Baby, when the group’s drastic immersion into 90’s alternative failed to collapse as drastically as we wanted it to, given the band’s self-righteousness and potential for pretension by the 80s’ close. The cycle repeated, though, and we kept watching through the relative failures of experimental albums Zooropa and Pop, and as the band won back their audience of baby boomers and their kids with the sappy balladry of 2000’s All that You Can’t Leave Behind. The problem, then, was that people bought it, and bought it big. How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, and its accompanying ipod-spearheaded media blitz, bring another question: the band may have undisputed relevance, but aren’t we going to get sick of this at some point?

The album is vintage U2, for better or worse. The band has consistently built on the sound of each successive album, and moments on How To Dismantle... recall every previous release. The ubiquitous lead single “Vertigo” is another safe anthem following the tried and true formula of “Beautiful Day,” “A Man and a Woman” instantly recalls the icy chords of “The Unforgettable Fire,” and the pounding chords of closer “Yahweh” recall War’s faith-related last track “40.” The band covers the full range of their sound, from Bono-centric acoustic numbers (“One Step Closer”) to lengthy and reflective epics (“Miracle Drug”) to the aforementioned rave-up single, which is one of only two songs under four minutes long.

The album suffers from over-writing and over-conceptualizing—U2 has too much to say these days to fit their ideas into concise songs, and thus these songs lose the urgency that characterized U2’s early sound in their sprawling nature. The other persisting problem on the album is the even further emerging figure of Bono. With his personal celebrity aside, he is increasingly becoming the central musical figure of the band, with his vocal twists and turns of phrase more memorable than any guitar hook or bassline, recalling the later albums of another band fronted by a singly-named poster boy—the Police.