Fun Town

The Beards

Sympathy for the Record Industry

If…

Fun Town

The Beards

Sympathy for the Record Industry

If The Beards’ debut album Fun Town accomplishes one thing, it’s this: The Muffs rock and Kim Shattuck is a screeching goddess. The Beards are a side project of The Lisa Marr Experiment’s Lisa Marr and Sherri Solinger as well as The Muffs’ Kim Shattuck. While it’s being released as a debut album, it’s more like a leftover feast of extra Buck and Muffs’ songs that never made it onto their band’s respective releases. A few songs were written specifically for the release, but that doesn’t seem to be the focus.

The album yearns to rock the socks off its listeners. However, more than anything, it annoys. Lisa Marr’s twangy, innocent voice is the equivalent of Frosted Cheerios. As the popular wheat product attempts to hide its more wholesome qualities with sugary sweetness, Marr tries to disguise her western style of wailing as a tough rock ‘n’ roll voice. This would be fine if it was a good twang, but it just hangs in the air for an instant then collects dust on the floor. Neither trick is fooling anyone and both leave an unpleasant taste in your mouth.

Even the first track, “This Girl,” (sung by Marr) is boring. No matter how many times the album is played, the song never becomes any more exciting. And that trend follows in songs like “My Pillow” and “Make It In America.” It’s not horrible music, it’s just not working for the good of the recording.

Luckily, the back of the jewel display showcases two stars beside each Shattuck recording, so it’s easier to skip through. From the first familiar growl on “My Pillow,” it becomes obvious that before there was Brody Armstrong, Kim Shattuck knew how to rock with the best of them and still does. But even her tracks on the album become disappointing. “1000 Years” features harmonizing from Marr in the background that clashes with Shattuck’s gravelly vocals. Fun Town is almost close to being good, but misses it by about 25 heartbeats.

The moral of the story is, if something wasn’t good enough the first time around, why release it at all? It equals a mediocre album that pales in the efforts of either bands’ career and is rough on anyone’s gag reflex.