Rating: NNNN
Recent nominees for best pop/rock band at the 2004 L.A. Weekly music awards, Lotusland garage threats Midnight Movies follow up a Monday-night residency at the star-spangled Spaceland nightclub with this fascinating full-length debut. With lush sonic textures, spooky-good cinematic effects, distorted guitars and a modern-day Nico in icy cool drummer-singer Gena Olivier, the trio concoct tunes that sound like the Velvet Underground doing soundtracks for Ed Wood movies. Olivier’s driving drumbeats have the primal quality of Mo Tucker’s best work, and the arrangements have a varied and vivid filmic vibe, mixing psyched-out riffs with strings, horns and music-box chimes. The lyrics are a bit baffling – stiff, and with doom-and-gloom imagery that belongs on a death metal disc – but the disconnected chill of Olivier’s vocals is surreal enough to pull it off.
