Elad Love Affair - A Woman Gives Birth To A Gun And It Stabs Her

Looking over the songs titles, I knew that this wouldn’t be a typical album. “Finding Sex Appeal in Oncoming Traffic,” “The Pardon Me End of the Knife,” “When You’ve Run Out of Words To Eat, You’ve Only Got Yourself” are a few of them. With a female vocalist who writes lyrics as bizarre as Flaming Lip’s Wayne Coyne and as non-sequitor as At The Drive In’s Cedric Bixler, coupled with a decent art-rock sound, Elad Love Affair’s A Woman Gives Birth to a Gun and It Stabs Her is an album that’s too big for its own good. Don’t get me wrong, I think this band has enormous potential, but the small room production limits the punchy, spacious style. The guitars sound muddy, the drums sound kind of boxy, and the vocals are over-compressed. While the instrumentation is precise and adequate, it still sounds like a live recording mixed to sound like a studio album. The songs are ambitious, well written, and incorporate just the right amount of diversity, however I can’t deny the apparent shortcomings. “Don’t hold yourself back / from eating through walls / don’t mean to burst your blimp / as hooves crease lips poised in smiles / saw them all clean raped with Clorox / it’s time to run away with the knives.” I’ve always felt that art-post-hardcore-ish bands benefit from sporadic, stream-of-consciousness style lyrics, because they correlate with the speed and intensity of the music. Lyrics like, “innocence is pulled from their cavities / painted and re-worn on wrongful faces / those who lay in the road / we won’t peel you up anymore” hint at symbolism and feel congruous at times, but more importantly just sound really nice incorporated into fast-tempo rock. It’s especially interesting to have a female vocalist who can pull off such off-the-wall lyrics as well as anyone else. I feel like I may be coming off on the wrong foot here, this isn’t at all a bad record. Had Elad Love Affair been given proper tools, they could have created something incredible. I’m hoping this is the case for the next record. Elad Love Affair could probably put on a hell of a show, but until they can capture that adrenaline in a studio setting, I’ll be away finding sex appeal in oncoming traffic and other albums. [www.eladloveaffair.com]