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FURTHERMORE WHAT, the debut from Oh-Ok, the latest band out of Athens. Ga., comes on like a decadent kiddies album, blending childlike innocence with childish perversity to set a tone that is, simultaneously harming and unsettling. The nursery-rhyme lyrics and the bright melodies on this six-song EP barely mask the obsessive, morbidity lurking beneath. In fact, the darker meanings are so tightly woven into the airy structure of the music that it becomes impossible to separate the perversity from the innocence...
Like the old nursery rhyme. "Ring Around the Rosies"--with its hidden suggestions of the bubonic plague--these songs translate the horrors of the adult world into children's language. The death, madness, and devil rituals on this EP may be common but Oh-Ok's handling of them in childish terms is quite original, something along the lines of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit", which turned an acid trip into an Alice-in-Wonderland fairy tale...
NONE of the other songs on this EP really match "Such 'n' Such" for the subtle way in which a nightmare casts a long shadow over playful innocence. Nevertheless, Oh-Ok does succeed in balancing the eerie, depressive tone of such songs as "Choukoutien" and "Elaine's Song" against the quiet, lightweight charm of numbers like "Straight" of "Giddy Up." And throughout the album, Oh-Ok manage to sustain a surreal, dreamlike atmosphere, without resorting to complicated, labored sound effects that would undermine this EP's simple, uncluttered quality...
This contradiction also serves to highlight Husker Du's major message: don't trust or look for answers in any music (even in Metal Circus), but rather look within yourself. For instance, in the first song on the EP, Mould states, "You can sing any song you want but you're still the same," thus denying the idea that music can or should after people's lives. In fact, this song reveals Husker Du's message and ideals more clearly than any other on the album. Behind the fast, clean guitar line which draws the listener into the album...
These two songs, with their extremely different viewpoints, lead the EP of uniformly intelligent, committed, and powerful songs. "Deadly Skies" and "It's not Funny Anymore" are the two other overtly political songs, and while their tone, at times, becomes a little too fatalistic, the sheer energy of the music and the passion of the vocals make the songs much more than just nihilistic poses. Mould might say "I like to protest, but I'm not sure what it's for" or "It doesn't matter anyway," but the listener never gets the feeling that one should just give...