MUSIC . Reconsider Me

You Who?

Imperial Teen


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Published: Sep 18, 2007

Imperial Teen's like that flaky friend who breezes into town every couple of years and expects you to drop everything. So you hang out and it's so much fun, but at the end of the night, when you both promise you won't let so much time pass between visits, you know better than to believe, because you've heard it all before.

Imperial Teen

What Is Not to Love

(Slash, 1998)

Imperial Teen

The Hair the TV the Baby & the Band

(Merge, 2007)

When Imperial Teen came together in 1996, it seemed like a one-off side project from Faith No More keyboardist Roddy Bottum and Sister Double Happiness drummer Lynn Truell. Seasick's grunge-pop was catchy, but a little late. With What Is Not to Love two years later, it looked like the quartet might be for real. The pop is poppier, the grooves are deeper and the lyrics are slightly less nonsensical. No one sticks to just one instrument, and everybody sings. "Year of the Tan" sets Truell and Will Schwartz on parallel lines; he's all agitated about whether he wants to dance while she channels Kim Deal's cool. Bottum milks the last bit of grunge on "Lipstick" and mellows out on "The Crucible."

The Jawbreaker soundtrack turned the sexy, sinister album track "Yoo Hoo" into a minor hit — it was by far the best thing to come out of the Heathers wannabe — but Imperial Teen lost momentum at a critical moment, and it took four years until they bounced back from major-label purgatory with On and a subsequent live album, and then they totally dropped off the radar once more.

Last month, they popped up again with The Hair the TV the Baby & the Band, their first release in half a decade. The comma-shy title is shorthand for the four members' alternate occupations: Jone Stebbins' a stylist, Bottum composes incidental music, Truell's a mother and Schwartz fronts dance-pop group Hey Willpower. Wordy as it is, it makes a giddy chorus for the deadpan title track. Bottum's good at mouthfuls; he also sings lead on the shimmery opener "Everything," which gets things going with a hooky litany ("Everything malicious/ And everything democracy/ Everything judicious/ And everything hypocrisy"). Truell's showcase, "Shim Sham," is one of the album's most fun moments, and Schwartz draws from his other job on the ass-shaking "Sweet Potato" and "One Two." Imperial Teen may be out of touch, but their flakiness doesn't hurt the hooks any. They just pick up where they left off.

(m_fine@citypaper.net)

The band — and Jone Stebbins' fantastic hair — will breeze into town Oct. 19 with a show at the North Star Bar.