Think Pink Radio

This music video for “Primatology,” from the album Bad News in a Party Dress by NYCensters Bambi, is no minor nutshell. Everything about it summarizes the group: DIY, campy, striking and friggin’ hysterical. Recorded on a Flip (have you seen the camera’s subway ads?) in the American Museum of Natural History among tourists and grade school field trips, you can almost see each band member’s smirk behind their clandestine lip synchs. All five players go through the motions but there are only two actual vocalists on the record, only hinting at the cheeky humor engrained in this clan of rogue theatre punks. At almost every turn, double entendres and back handed references make you think twice about the detailed stories unfolding on each track. Songs like “Rosemary’s Baby’s Daddy” and “Motorbike” contain equal amounts of hard guitars, girl group harmonies, and Prince-y falsettos that mix inside a kitchen sink held together by singers Kevin Townley and Hannah Cheek. Their narratives swirl around monsters, emotion and vice–ingredients for a dark grungy stage, and when you realize no one is doing “musical theatre” quite like this, it starts to make more sense when you know that the album was partly recorded in Chicago with Bobby Conn. His brand of classic rock drama and science fiction concepts make an appropriate mentor for Bambi, who is more or less expanding on Conn’s premise that rock and roll should be aggressive and girly, fierce and nerdy all at the same time. Bad News in a Party Dress is available at CD Baby.