Boogie Boarder – Pizza Hero – Album Review

In case you are wondering, yes you are reading today’s headline correctly.  The album we are reviewing today is actually called Pizza Hero and it is by a band called Boogie Boarder.  Don’t worry, I was skeptical at first myself, but after hearing the first few seconds of their latest single, “Bio Hassle,” I was sold on these dudes.  In fact, I’m really glad that I gave this record a shot because it may have taught me a valuable lesson about judging a book by its cover.  I believe that I have mentioned this before, but typically I am great at picking out bands and records that I end up enjoying based primarily on their names.  As we accumulate more and more music in our inboxes here at Citizen Dick HQ, I have been relying on this gift more and more of late.  Sometimes I score, sometimes I don’t, but either way there is a ton of potentially great music that I may or may not be missing out on as a result of the bands I end up ignoring.  To be honest, I couldn’t even tell you what inspired me to check these guys out based on my usual criteria.  My best guess is some combination of boredom, morbid curiosity, slight hunger, and the need to find out if these guys were actually serious (I mean, what kind of band, besides the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, would name their album after pizza).  In any event, I’m glad I gave it a shot because, as it turns out, this is actually some pretty fucking awesome music.

From what I can tell, Boogie Boarder is a Brooklyn outfit made up of anywhere from two to four members, and Pizza Hero is their second proper album.  Their website list the members as Cyrus Lubin & Paul Gladstone playing Drums and Keyboards, respectively, but there is obviously guitar, bass, and vocals involved in their work.  That and the fact that all of the photos I found of them include either three or four dudes leads me to believe that there is at least one other member in the mix there somewhere.  The thing is, there really isn’t a whole lot of info or press on these guys out there on the web to uncover.  Even their own website is quite cryptic about their origins, offering only this bit of obviously satirical information:

“Boogie Boarder started out playing shows online in chat rooms, mostly PS3 pre-release rumor sites. We had all met on a pretty great dating site for EverQuest damage dealers and anyway it turned out that everybody in our fantasy league was totally into what we were all about. I guess it was right at the end of last preseason we signed the deal to do Charleen’s office party Superbowl halftime show and everything pretty much took off from there. Recently, we just wrapped up a sort of internship opening for a guy that can play basically any Kenny Chesney song ever recorded on Guitar Hero.

We’ve finished writing and drawing our second album, Pizza Hero, which is coming out on Famous Class early in 2009. You’ll be able to pick it up at Tower as soon as we settle a legal question over our use of elements from Theme to Point Break (Deets’ Lament).

Our own sound is the beast-lord avatar of a two-minute pop song and we are based in Brooklyn, NY.”

Based on that snipet and their playful name and album title, it’s obvious that these guys don’t take themselves too seriously.  But don’t let that fool you, because it’s also obvious after listening to their new album that they do take their music very seriously.  Billed as a surf rock band, I personally hear more lo-fi garage with a slight grungy blues influence than anything else.  Opener “Sparkels” does a good job of setting the tone for the album, despite being a pseudo-instrumental tune featuring some sparse and extremely muted vocals.  As with most of the rest of the tracks on the record, the shining star is the combination of the keys and drums working in tandem with the ambitiously crunchy guitar riffs, almost thrusting them forward into your ears like turbo boosters. From there we come to “Bio Hassle,” which I find to be the standout track on the record.  Again, the vocals are quite sparse but not as muted as in other tracks, and with more rhythm and repetition to the chants.  As the album plays through, the biggest downfall is the fact that there isn’t a whole lot of diversity to it.  But given that there are only eight tracks clocking in at less than 30 minutes it really isn’t that big of a concern because all of them are certainly good enough to hold your interest and stave off any notion of boredom. To be honest, the record reminds me a lot of the Crystal Antlers release that I reviewed and loved earlier this year in that it relies heavily on orchestrated noise.  The difference being that here the instruments work to help each other shine, rather than acting as competition for each other as they did on the Antlers record.

Overall I give Pizza Hero a hearty stamp of approval, which is a big deal for me considering that it is, essentially, an instrumental record, and I typically don’t get down without vocals.  It’s fun, you can dance to it, and it ends before you start thinking about switching it off.  Can you really ask for anything else out of an album like this?  I sure can’t think of much, besides maybe a little more vox.  It drops on June 23rd on Famous Class records.

Boogie Boarder – “Bio Hassle”

Boogie Boarder – “Little Giants”