Tunabunny Could Be Your Life
In the interest of your interests, I will tell you the secret right now: Tunabunny’s Genius Fatigue is not only far and away their best record to date, but it is also a fractured pop masterpiece—a post-millennial variable-fi (indie)pop liberty bell to call our very own. Sort of what I imagine Avocado Baby’s A Million and Nine and Sex and Gum and Stuff would have sounded like with a couple extra gallons of ambition on top of their otherwise flawless ideals.
No one is going to pretend that the record’s songs which most closely resemble the generally accepted architecture of songs (“Serpents & Light”, “Slackjawed”, “Form A Line”) aren’t Genius Fatigue’s best moments. But, it’s worth noting that those songs succeed, at least in part, as a result of the essential surrounding guts (guts being as literal as possible here—don’t think filler) of the record. A song like “Pacyderm, Fallen” ends up being kind of brilliant because of its either carefully considered or wholly arbitrary juxtaposition. With Tunabunny you never really know. And that’s just as well, because love them or hate them, not even your mom’s friends at her VFW quilting meetups would call them boring.
I’m a bad writer and this is a shit review, but Genius Fatigue is not a shit record and Tunabunny are a brilliant band with more radical ideas than fingers to conceive them.
In the “We’re Not Gonna Take It” bedroom scenario of today’s youth, our Strat-wielding protagonist would be better off spinning around and morphing into Tunabunny than Dee Snider.
