Pony Up! - Make Love to the Judges with Your Eyes

Pony Up is a reduced, all-female version of The Arcade Fire: a cheery bunch, trapped in the slow cadences of their French Canadian roots, and their CD, Make Love to the Judges with Your Eyes is a trivial, repetitious attempt to be poignant: the guy in the room who always brings cheap flowers on a date. The musical choice to add a lo-fi, tinkertoy of a keyboard to the all-too familiar drums ‘n guitars is annoying, not pleasant, and they don’t take the hint: the whole album is a slow-moving variation on the same bad idea. That, by the way, doesn’t make them hopeless romantics—it just makes them bland. Sarah Moundroukas’s voice is too frail and scratchy to match the beat of a louder song like “Pastime Endeavor,” and while she’s supported for the slower and emotive tracks like “Lines Bleed,” it takes more than a warble and a good line (“Why is everyone so rehearsed?”) to energize a song. Pony Up’s second singer, Laura Willis, is more talented. “Dance for Me” is a sexual, role-reversing song, and Willis, dropping octaves for the lead-in to the chorus sounds like she really could “eat you alive/you know that I could just take you inside.” Here, Willis’s keyboarding bounds across the track like her voice, and the lo-fi hum of the guitar is a calm but fueling force. Not so with the rest of the album. These tracks are long enough to grow whiny, and the grainy texture of tracks like “Possible Harm” seems lazy, not intentional. Good beats are swallowed whole by poor production, and whole stories are gobbled up by dead space. “Only Feelgood,” with its nasal accordion, does anything but make one feel good and the love that should be expressed by a song like “Ships” is decimated by the cheap carousel chimes of the keyboard. Their album’s title, given all that, makes sense: if you pony up hard earned cash for this CD, having perhaps read a good review somewhere, then it’s only because this album has made love to the judges—and with their eyes alone is anyone’s guess. [www.myspace.com]