Gogogo Airheart

Rats! Sing! Sing! (Gold Standard Laboratories)

This is the sound of a basement recording studio overcome by friendship and debauchery. Buddies twiddling knobs and screeching into beat-up mics, guitars clanging and spurting to some random arrhythmia. San Diego fourpiece GoGoGo Airheart is old enough to know better. Their sixth full-length, and third on Omar A. Rodriguez-Lopez’s Gold Standard Laboratories, Rats! Sing! Sing! opens with a nightmarish fable of wasted candlelight, “Rats.” GoGoGo follows the hi-hat craze with “So Good” and “Taxi Up,” throwing a goodly amount of grit on the dance floor, yet their roots shine brightest from the old-school garage days (“Burn It Down,” “Shake It Off,” “Come to My House”). There’s no doubt these boys know how to throw a party, but even when tossing a hint of dub into the mix (“Dub Two,” “Turn Out the Lights”) nothing runs smoothly. Summed up by closing jam “Double Bummer,” GoGoGo has trashed the place. Some might tout the mess of genres and unwillingness to conform, but with an album this sporadic, avant-garde experimentalism verges on lo-fi wankery. Just like their mentors in the Mars Volta, GoGoGo Airheart needs to find its center. (Wednesday, March 15, 1:15am @ Room 710)

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This article appears in March 10 • 2006.

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