3 out of 5

Label: Touch and Go

Produced by: Charles Bennington, Geoff Turner

Latching on to the dumb ‘sexy’ sweaty swagger of GVSB and taking it to its loungiest extreme, New Wet Kojak brought Scott McCloud’s distinctive groan / murmur vocals and Johnny Tyemple’s heavy-handed, melodic bass from Girls Against Boys and married it to some fellow DC denizens’ drums and guitar – Nic Pelliciotto and Geoff Turner, respectively – and topped it with the drawling, scattered sax of Charles Bennington for a lurid, danceable mix of groove heavy silliness. While some tracks play at being proper drugged-up, seductive fare – opener Stick Out Your Tongue hits that mark, and its screwy, minimalized remix is brilliant second take on the same – others feel like McCloud and crew smirking at us, with his offhand chanting (‘Tito, Tito’) and ranting (most of ‘Sexy Postcard’) and the loose playing style the possible results of what songs sound like after being on stage all night, drunk and high. But then mixed in you get clear indications that there’s a _band_ at work (something further cemented on their three subsequent releases…): the coda of ‘Postcard,’ for example, whirls itself into a stripped back GVSB rocky beat; ‘You Got Some Dog’ actually succeeds at being a nigh-sincere late-night obsessive’s narrative, mysterious and surreal; Me Acuerdo De Ti is a kind of swoony, post-rock Chicago thing that I wouldn’t have pinned on any of these guys’ related groups; closer Shake You Down is a nice, raspy, GVSB-esque punch. The album, as a whole, is undeniably intriguing, but its rawness ultimately translates to something a bit too disconnected to make it entirely memorable. Given how the group would shape up the sound on later discs, it’s suggestive of this first album being more a true ‘side project,’ only truly emerging once GVSB more or less went dormant.