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Genders, "There's Something In The Treats"
Anyone with a cheap drum machine and a loose understanding of the bassguitar can probably crank out a record better than this in acouple of hours; but they'll need a dirty 4-track cassette recorder tocapture it any worse.
Tigerbeat 6
When I first put this record on, I thought that there must be some sortof gimmick. It seemed only reasonable that this was the product of apair of twin brothers living somewhere remote in the Appalachianmountains who happened upon a drum machine through some The Gods Must Be Crazysort of incident where a cheap rhythm box fell from the sky to perplexthe simple people who'd never seen such a thing before. If this wereoutsider music, at least it would have an excuse for failing to producea single worthwhile musical moment. But there's no such interestingback-story for Genders, I'm afraid.
The truth is far more banal: Genders is a couple of art-punksfrom Detroit who may put on a fashionably quirky live show, but whohaven't managed to capture anything on record that's remotely honest orinteresting. The songs on There's Something in the Treats mightbe aiming for some minimalist kind of anxious dub, but the playing isso bad, the rhythms so mechanical (and not in a good way), and themelodies so pedestrian that this sounds like the demos my friends whowere way too in to Ministry for their own good used to make in highschool. There's certainly an atmosphere created by the wailing,no-effort vocals and the sloppy bass lines and the squeals of noiseenhanced by tape hiss and a muddy recording, but it would take acynical mind indeed to appreciate anything about that atmosphere.
The problem for me is that this whole thing is so phony. It'smanufactured to be bad and intentionally stiff and lo-fi and thosequirks are supposed to be part of the style, when a more honestapproach would be just to write songs and try to make them connect withpeople who aren't along for the retro-fetish, Sprockets ride.If this were 1992, I'd say that this sounds like 16 year olds trying todo something like Bauhaus, but given the time and technology that'scome since those days, this sounds more like a hackneyed attempt tosell '80s kitsch and alienation as fashion. If the members ofGenders are really as tortured as their songs would like us to believe,why hamstring everything with shitty production values and retroelectro beats?
There's a scene in Liquid Sky where one ofthe hopeless art goons is singing a horrible, motorik kind of Kraftwerkmeets no wave tune and as embarrassing as that scene is to watch(though it was brilliantly sampled by Phonecia), this record is atleast a factor of ten worse. Genders parades around the samepretentious flaunting of a lack of talent or effort that makes thecharacter in Liquid Sky seem so clueless.I was honestly shocked at how much I despised this record. I'll giveanything on Tigerbeat 6 the time of day without question just becausethe label has a remarkable track record for finding artists who havesomething to say, and something important to contribute. This one flieswell wide of the mark, and that's a shame, but ultimately the label'sbig enough and successful enough to drop out a few clunkers. Thisis definitely one.
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