Pitchfork

Ponytail have gone and let their hair grow long. The Baltimore four-piece's 2006 debut, Kamehameha, used frothy, candied art-punk, with surf-splotched guitars and ricocheting drums, as a shiny playpen for vocalist Molly Sigel's improvisatory farm-animal ululations. As with a lot of what's been coming out of their city lately, that shit was weirdly compelling. "Celebrate the Body Electric (It Came from an Angel)"-- the lead single from Ponytail's forthcoming follow-up, Ice Cream Spiritual, for Baltimore imprint We*Are*Free-- stretches out the fun-fueled chaos to an epic seven minutes of crests, eddies, tsunamis, and hey wowie wow, even a few seconds of limpid tranquility. Giving a Deerhoof-like scissor kick to traditional song structure, the track jerks froms No Age's loose, trilling ambience to wiry, explosive bursts, with spaghetti Western backing vocals and Sigel chirping something like, "Awaywegonowawaywego!" There's calm eventually, too, as Sigel's rooster crow turns into a canary coo, but before long everything goes berserk again. It's all enough to make you believe in the spirituality of ice cream. Away we go to 31 flavors.

[from Ice Cream Spiritual; due 06/17/08 on We*Are*Free]