If you’re in a band, before your next practice, instead of going into your rehearsal space or your basement, head on out to Costco. While there, buy buckets of candy and bubble gum–the sweeter and more artificial, the better. During practice, start eating. Eat between what you’re working on, and don’t wipe your hands or faces off. Then, maybe, you’ll have as much energy as Baltimore’s Ponytail, a young outfit looking as if they rolled straight out of the performing arts high school, pupils pinned with corn syrup and carnauba wax from an hours-long sucrose bender.
Slamming excitable riffage into drumming that blows out of the pocket, Ponytail follows in the tradition of a number of past punk-ish temples to whirling dervish female singers, calling to mind Melt-Banana and the Dog Faced Hermans, borrowing key moods and elements from both. But the clearest influence seems to be Bow Wow Wow, that unclassifiable misfire of Malcolm McLaren’s post-Pistols career: both bands share a diffuse, genre-warping approach to creating something new. You may not have heard a singer like Ponytail’s Molly Siegel before, but on Ice Cream Spiritual (We Are Free, 2008) her wild screeching and whinnying–peppered with exuberant lyrics and a breathless delivery–turns the pitch of this bass-free quartet well beyond where you’d expect. Whether that’s a good or bad thing depends upon your tolerance for youthful expression and all of the walls it bumps along its path. A short runtime makes for maximum impact, though any more might burn listeners out.
That said, any band with a sound this committed to getting free deserves notice. Plangent melodies buffeted by expressions of manic happiness never fail to bring such a sentiment around. Credit Ponytail for even having the stamina to get to that state of mind, not to mention stay there.