Review Summary: Ridiculously fun all-girl punk from California.
All the vocals on Mika Miko’s C.Y.S.L.A.B.F., all the yips, shrieks, squeaks, squawks and call outs, all the shouts, the mumbles, the bleats sound like they were recorded during a truly harrowing telephone conversation. The band’s two lead singers Jet Blanca and Victor Fandgore accomplish this effect through the art of call and response, but, even more so, by having Victor (who, like all of the group’s five members, is female) sing her lyrics through an actual telephone receiver. The band, along with fellow Los Angelesians (or whatever you would call someone from LA) No Age and Abe Vigoda, has been getting considerable press as of late; some writers have gone as far as to put the groups at the forefront of the new American punk rock scene. So is there really anything special about Mike Miko?
Sure there is. Given, however, the actual music isn’t all that original or anything. Most tunes falls somewhere under the blanket description of “guitar heavy”, featuring, at their core, tense, straight-from the garage power chords. It’s in their distinctive blend of influences and the two lead singers’ remarkable charisma (most immediately evident when they sing together, like on the excellent Jogging Song) where Mika Miko find their foothold on the totem pole of Hardcore. Tons of reviews are going to champion this band for doing the all-female indie thing better than anybody since Sleater-Kinney, and I guess this review is the same, in that aspect at least. Listen:
Mika Miko does the all-female indie thing better than anybody since Sleater-Kinney.
There, I said it.
What Mika Miko seem most adept at on this release is combing the most exciting elements from all the female fronted rock bands of the past 2 decades and making them their own. You can hear the riot-grrl influence, but only if I was at a real lose for words would I stoop down low enough to call this band riot-grrl. Imagine what The Go! Team would sound like trying to cover an Arab on Radar tune as faithfully as possible, and you might have an idea of what Mika Miko sounds like. But even then, Mika Miko’s songs are far more lo-fi, and despite a definite danceable quality, retain most of the aggressiveness of LA hardcore bands of decades past. Business Cats perhaps defines the record’s ambition more than anything within the album’s meager 13 tracks. It’s accessible enough to appear in a car commercial (before the rabble-rousing vocals come in anyway) but the buzz saw guitars and rumbling bass line are a far cry from anything you would hear during TRL. Or perhaps Oh, Head Spin! says it even better. The music is neo-post punk at its finest, echoing more than its fair share of indie giants and surpassing most of them, while the vocals recall a younger, smarter Slits. Both Blanca and Fandgore reach into their highest frequencies for every note; an acapella version of the track could easily be mistaken for an episode of Alvin and the Chipmunks if it weren’t for the song’s extreme brevity and the shrieky tones of both women’s’ voices.
Now, not all of C.Y.S.L.A.B.F. is fantastic, but most of it reaches goes far and beyond expectations. Listen to this record alone in your room and dance yourself mad.
-Joe.
