The Lost Sounds have me. Staple together the seemingly incongruous elements of new wave, garage rock, psych, and distorto keyboard while not making it sound like piss. They make it sound like a cyborg-electric monster that’ll sometimes crush you and sometimes fuck you like you’ve never been fucked. These are demos spanning a four-year period. It’s cool to hear and read about how each of these twenty-one songs (plus intro and outro bits) were made. (Jay found a damaged saxophone in a dumpster and played it on a lark on “Energy Drink and the Long Walk Home.”) But, if you’re looking for a firm introductory handshake to the band, I’d go for the almost flawless Rat’s Brains and Microchips. If you’ve already got that and want to peek behind the curtain, don’t mind raw production, and want to see how Siouxie Sioux would have sounded if she fronted a battle-scarred Servotron, by all means, this is a whiz-bang of a CD.
–todd (On/On Switch)