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DECADENCE
(Warner Bros.)
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The first three songs on Head Automatica’s debut CD — a strange-bedfellow collaboration that teams Glassjaw singer Daryl Palumbo with hip-hop beatmeister Dan "The Automator" Nakamura — are as close to perfect as anything that’s come out of the current dance-punk revival. Palumbo’s hard-core-trained vocals give the jolty, synth-driven "At the Speed of a Yellow Bullet" the kind of urgency that lesser neo-new-wavers like the Fever spend their nights dreaming about. "Brooklyn Is Burning" has the Automator dropping ’70s soul samples under acid-washed guitars, while "Beating Heart Baby" sounds like At the Drive-In pumped through a postmodern-disco sound system. Those tracks are so good, in fact, that the rest of the album pales in comparison. Palumbo and the Automator are obviously aiming for a crossover sound that can rock clubs, SUVs, and heads simultaneously, but — after those first three songs — they succeed only sporadically. "Please Please Please (Young Hollywood)" dissects the dirty dance floors of Los Angeles but sounds like a Filter reject; "Head Automatica Sound System" unfortunately revisits the dying embers of rap-rock. Consistency isn’t Head Automatica’s strong suit, but creativity is clearly high on their list. Too bad more of their experiments didn’t work as well as the disc’s first three tracks.
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