w/The Gris Gris, The Charming Snakes, Plastic Crimewave Sound
Sat May 14, Neumo's, 9 pm, $10, all ages.
For about three minutes on their first album, Laced with Romance, the Ponys caught the song Phil Spector and the Ramones always wanted. They called it "Fall Inn," had their froggy-voiced female bass player sing it, and you best believe I was in love! It sounded like a Jesus and Mary Chain rip-off of "Then He Kissed Me"--punk-skewed pop with its most delicate parts unmutilated--and it set up a vicious second-album cliffhanger. If the Ponys could pick up where "Fall Inn" dropped off, wow… and if not, well, looks like they just put out the record anyway.
The Chicago band's latest, Celebration Castle, takes four songs just to get shaking ("I'm With You" features John Hughes' soundtrack guitar sparkle), six to get steady ("Shadow Box," itself a shadow of "Fall Inn"), and the full 10 to really screw you. "Ferocious" should have been a fun filler track on the rock'n'roll radio record of the year, not the hopeful finale to a deflated follow-up that dips from a flat Feelies-style guitar tangle ("Glass Conversation") to a bottomed-out Cure casualty called "We Shot the World." And then the fake-good "Get Black" stabs you with a hee-haw harmonica solo just when you're cheering up--Little Walter, Chicago needs you again! It's like the Ponys figured out exactly what made them great and then rebuilt themselves without it. But that's the story of the Ramones' album End of the Century, too: If it ain't broke, break it!
