The Intelligence

Consider, if you will, the combination of boredom and terror. (If you won't, get your ass-face back in the PT Cruiser you rode in on; we don't like your kind around here.) The combo is not just the inevitable couplet of the current millennium, but a dream destination and a Tupperware party that you can't wait to escape from, too. Like salt and pepper, Turner and Hooch, Love and Rockets, ebony and ivory, and shock and awe, boredom and terror are unavoidable; they are culture and culture is them. Get used to it, baby, because they're already pretty used to you. In order to sonically lay it down sideways for you, Lars Finberg, the lo-fi dandy of West Seattle, locked his front door and pressed the record button on his favorite eight-track machine and made ten songs that could be either ecclesiastic alien probes, Hank Williams going electro-slash, or John Lennon making friends with a video game. Finberg, you'll probably want to know, is the Battlestar Galactica-esque drummer of the A-Frames, and while the programmed beats he's employed herein are reminiscent of that band's post-punk heroics, their digital drag and slur render them feathers of an entirely different bird. Lyrically, our post-pop sarcastic Snoop Dog-substitute slays us best on the album's standout track, "Telephone Wires," rhyming "telephone wires/connecting the liars/directly to fires/that never get tired" and on and on and on. And while it should be said that Finberg, in his sequestered 8-track sanctuary, teems with true talent, it simply has to be said that the band he has collected in the wake of these recordings are veritable toolboxes of the stuff. Members of A-Frames, Pyramids, and Thee Flying Dutchmen join Finberg in his live recitations of this stuff, and it only gets way, way better.. So now that you've had some time to floss your brain with the combo of our generation and simultaneously spin this little Ritz of a cracker in your Discman, we're sure you'll agree that terror is indeed boring and boredom is indeed terrifying. And the Intelligence are your new People magazine.