Front Bottoms "The Front Bottoms" LP

Their music is lively, off-kilter pop you can dance to, and their lead singer talks and rants in an eccentric fashion much more than he sings, so on first listen it's not hard to imagine the Front Bottoms are some sort of junior league version of Cake. Except that while Cake's music sounds carefully calculated and willfully odd, the Front Bottoms seem as if this stuff spontaneously exploded out of them, as guitarist and vocalist Brian Sella valiantly tries to get his wildly complicated train of thought to travel from his brain to his mouth before it derails, and drummer Mathew Uychich swats madly at his kit as he urges his buddy along. While the 12 songs on the Front Bottoms' first album for Bar/None often sound like they happened in a burst of frantic emotion more than they were composed, that doesn't change the fact this duo has a real way with a tune, urgent and confident at the same time, with a dash of punk immediacy coexisting with a grand pop vision that finds room for everything from stripped-back Brill Building classicism to cool proto-disco dance grooves.