2 out of 5

Label: Artist One-Stop

Producer: John Congleton, David Gross

Faux Fox is pretty much new-new wave banana hooey, with dumb posturing, keep-it-coming electro beats, silly lyrics and over-dramatic vocals.  I only have two albums due to John Congleton’s involvement, so I can’t say if it’s his touch or the band’s, but when the songs move beyond the beat and chorus to some wacky freakouts, they’re actually pretty great.  It’s just too bad that the lead dude has to ‘sing’ over most of it with oddly politically-tinged lines about people being fascists and Ronald Reagan and I’m sure there’s a joke that I’m just not cool enough / don’t wear enough jewelry to get.  I would say I’m not old enough but I’m likely older than these dudes now so they probably just had some sexy college professor whip ’em up into idealism in their ‘Alternative Thinking’ class.

Yeah, sorry.  The pics of the dudes on the inside ruin the cool positive / negative space album art because they’re all decked out in attitude and 80s.  Again, maybe it’s a joke.  But I’m not big on image-as-joke bands either.  Anyhoo, take any of those dancey Rapture-esque bands from the early 00s and give ’em the vocalist from The Killers and then indie it up a dash by removing the need for catchy hooks, and that’s most of it.  But one layer deeper are some pretty great key and synth workings that are blasted out to impressive extremes once all the silly singin’ is out of the way.