Imperial Teen -- What Is Not To Love

(Slash)

On their second full-length, What Is Not To Love, Imperial Teen provide the images to go with the hooks that made 1996's Seasick such a killer debut.

The music is more adventurous, the har-mon-ies more complex and the lyrics deeper and funnier, and if queen bee Will Schwartz no longer sings like Carol Channing channeling Johnny Thunders, it's only because he's had a couple more years to study the even-more Imperial Mark Robinson's pop whisper. In fact, when the initial buzz on Robinson's Flin Flon had me

convinced they'd made the 1990s pop masterpiece, this is almost exactly

what I envisioned: textured guitars with relatively few chord changes,

vocal guy / girl melodies spliced with guy/girl chants that follow the bass

instead of the guitar, and a humor that lets Schwartz end one of the album's many ruminations on stalking with: "All she wanted was a pony/ just a pony."

One big difference between the new one and the old one is the added texture in the pretty songs: Maybe it's just the band name that makes "Beauty" remind me so much of Unrest's "Imperial," "Isabel" and "Six-Layer Cake."

Regardless of the influence, What Is Not To Love takes Schwartz and Bottum beyond the coming-out-stories to display their attractions and kinks as a matter of experience, not science.

---- Dave Harrison