Can you guess what "yyymf" stands for? I had no idea when I first grabbed this CD, but after a couple of listens I immediately figured it out. You might too if you just listen to it.
Right after Pixies' 1989 album Dolittle came out and became my favorite album of all time, I immediately started asking my hardcore punk brother if there were any other bands just like them. He tried to hook me up with several bands, and none of them had that same magic, that same perfect balance of the angry/fast and the intelligent/artsy. If I'd heard Mythological Horses back then, I probably would have said, "Here we go! This is fun! This'll do!" Band members Shawn Holley (guitars, vocals), Kurt Bloch (guitar), Kurt Danielson (bass) and Jest Commons (drums) look a little dog-eared in their band photos, so I kind of assume they were around when Doolittle came out. That's not to infer they've ripped off Pixies--they don't really devote themselves entirely to quietLOUDquiet--but there are similarities in the plaintive lead guitar, and Commons sounds a lot like David Lovering. A lot.
Shawn Holley can scream like Black Francis, but he's the biggest tangent. He's got one of those hyper-nerdy New Wave voices that we used to hear a lot during the early '80s. I feel like he could probably sing a pretty faithful version of Soft Cell's "Sex Dwarf" if he wanted to. But here's the thing--I'm not saying that Mythological Horses are derivative. I just think they dug the same music I did when I was younger, and they took it a step further by actually forming a band around these New Wave themes.
I'm starting to see a movement towards resurrecting the original New Wave sound, the one that came along around 1979 or 1980 that let all us nice kids know that there was a compromise between hardcore and all that shitty dinosaur rock that had become truly boring. Mythological Horses shines in one area, it's the two guitar attack, the one that reminds me a lot of Ramones' "Road to Ruin" days. Those were the days when we found out that punk could have a sense of humor, a coherency and an attitude that wasn't consumed with anger. This is such a fun album, a blast in the classic sense, and you might find yourself screaming "YYYMF!" before it's all over.
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