This week, I reviewed Japanther’s latest, Tut Tut Now Shake Ya Butt, for PopMatters. For whatever reason, the usually reliable Brooklyn noise-punk duo chose to devote more than half of their record’s runtime to spoken word tracks from punk icon Penny Rimbaud. While that might have sounded like a good idea on paper, there’s an obvious clash between the songs and the spoken word tracks in terms of tone, pacing and subject matter, with the end result being a real lack of cohesiveness. What were they thinking? I’m sure I don’t know.
