Rory - We're Up To No Good

We’re Up To No Good, We’re Up To No Good is a rock-by-numbers release that feels more like an exercise in historical knowledge than a performance worth noting. (It’s also worth noting that their title is an accurate description of their work on this album.) As if going down a checklist, Rory has the shrill punk of My Chemical Romance, the odd techno-paranoia of Radiohead, the myriad rock influences of decades of jamming, and a little bit of dabble here and there. But it never comes together to make an album: it’s the parts alone, not their sum. This actually makes Rory’s release more frustrating than the worthless exhortations of other raging bands. You'll undoubtedly find something you like on this wildly eclectic album, but you'll just as assuredly lose it again in a stream of non sequiturs. The fifteen-minute finale, “Everybody Stabbed Me and it Didn’t Even Hurt,” shows where Rory goes wrong: they’re so busy jumping from style to style that they lose the listener. Imagine Pynchon as a composer: one moment, the oxymoronic sound of acoustic electrics; the next, sonic distortions by way of Mars Volta and other psychedelic pluckers. Just when you hit a stretch of sweet violins overlapping jagged licks, the vocals come in (“Wake up to the buzzards”) and just as you’re getting accustomed to that hard rock chorus (“There’s nothing you can’t do now/you’re snake eyes”) there’s a downshift into syncopated 80s rock. If music is a journey, Rory's lyrics are less guideposts than false directions from the sort of people who bite their thumb at tourists. Ha-ha, goes the music, made you listen. By this point, caught in the death knell of a surging instrumental break (“Free Bird,” anyone?), there’s a sudden glimmer of hope from a brass section, enough to make you think that angels play a mean sax, not harps—but wait, you’re still in a cacophonous hell. This Pollock-like playing--a splattering of talent in a market that looks for solid colors--is wasted time. [www.roryrock.com]