Texas Platters

Yuppie Pricks

Over their six years together, Austin's Yuppie Pricks' role-playing punk schtick has depreciated somewhat, their eponymous stereotype now supplanted by the hipster douche bag as pop-cultural whipping boy de rigueur. Fortunately, the Pricks compensate for their decreasing timeliness by being a better band. Balls. is tighter and beefier than 2004's Brokers Banquet, and in a daring test of the old saw that risk is necessary to good satire, vocalist Trevor Middleton continues to proudly flip the bird at irreverence as he leaves it in the dust of plain obscenity. The Pricks hedge (har!) their bets with gloriously ripping performances of songs by the Undertones, the Chumps, and Big Boys – charitably overlooking the anti-yuppie message of "Frat Cars" – and do the music world a final service by festooning their disc with a hairy man's flag-clad nether regions. Now nobody else needs to do that.