A psychedelic rock quintet from Madison, WI, at one moment
Plastic sounds like
Lenny Kravitz, the next synth-driven Scary Monsters
Bowie, and the next Smashing Pumpkins. What got my interest was that they've covered
the Cure's "Fascination Street" and
the Cars' "Moving With Stereo," but they're less subversive than the former and as transparent as the latter without
Ric Ocasek's uniqueness. This is too overproduced, with
Jake Johnson's vocals too stylized and affected, but occasionally they break into a passage, like the bridge in "All That You Have," that shows potential underneath the heavier rock and trippier modern elements clashing. In the end, one wonders what this band wants to be; a lot of this sounds like genre-hopping taste testing. But if
Plastic someday moves away from the too glossy alterna-rock, the few bad trips into Red Hot Chili land, and the hip-hop pretensions ("Tomorrow"), who knows? (P.O. Box 370156, Milwaukee, WI 53237;
[email protected])