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Poni Hoax, "Images of Sigrid"
On the surface, the second album from Poni Hoax seems to have it all: brooding synthesizers, punchy drums, a dispassionate yet forceful singer, and an icy attitude. While it contains several good songs and some decent hooks, it's not enough to override the album's overbearing mood or its sections of needless repetition.
One of the album's biggest flaws is that too many of these songs are far longer than necessary. The band seems unable to pare down these songs to their essential elements, and the result is a bunch of otherwise enjoyable tracks that end up overstaying their welcome. The opener "The Paper Bride" is a perfect example of this. The intro builds tension for almost two minutes, which is almost a minute and a half longer than necessary. After the vocals have finished, it then continues with little variation for two more minutes, making what could have been a sharp three or four minute pop song into a nearly seven-minute epic. This is a formula that similarly buries and ruins pop gems like "Antibodies" and "Crash-Pad Driver." Also dooming the album is the nearly fourteen-minute-long ambient closer "Faces in the Water" that seems like mere tacked-on filler. It's completely out of place and adds nothing to the album overall.
The album's stand-out track is "The Bird Is on Fire," the only song that was able to maintain my interest from beginning to end. It has a discernible structure that goes through natural changes as it progresses, heightening its enjoyment at every turn. There are also a couple of near misses, like "Pretty Tall Girls" and "All Things Burn," but they're not enough to save this album.
Attitude reigns supreme here at the expense of content. Besides being too long, there are simply too many other bands doing music like this much more successfully to make Images of Sigrid linger for long in the memory.
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