Pitchfork

With its fortified Bunnymen-meets-Chronic Town jangle, "Another Wound" may initially seem an unlikely choice to headline such a punchy little set, but once this addictive lead-off has cruised through a couple effortless verses, its guitars have accumulated enough residual distortion to pack a not inconsiderable bite. Jered Gummere's distanced Richard Hell vocal hysterics remain a distinctly polarizing element throughout these tracks, as he settles his unique adenoidal yowl somewhere outside of both standardized punk affectations and conventional pop-weighted patterns.

His approach serves the Ponys well on their buzzed, surprisingly muscular cover of the Descendents' "Good, Good Things", an uninventive but nevertheless winning joiner that indicates the band can still pound out a waterproof garage anthem with effortless aplomb. One might expect more of the same from the quaint "I Wanna Fuck You", which instead proves to be exactly the type of artful guitar-pop that would've made another good neighbor on Celebration Castle, with or without the chorus' casual swears. This cut does, however, contain a brief, torrential Flip Your Wig guitar solo as markedly dissonant as any the Ponys have yet featured.

An alternate stripe of dissonance appears in the oddball clip-clop rhythms of "Prosthetic Head", a woozy shuffle filled with drippy underwater keyboard effects, trebly guitars and echo-laden vocals, with Gummere skating this uneven surface while fussily complaining about getting strangled with a telephone cord. The performance reveals in the band a welcome streak of eccentricity, one that provides for a sympathetic segue into the near-grunge of "How Does It Taste", a track which occasionally swerves within a chin-hair of Nirvana's "All Apologies".

Somewhat strangely, this short collection closes with a rather anti-climactic reprise of Laced With Romance's "Looking Out a Mirror". A propulsive mélange of skronky guitars and beach party organ, the song contains what is still one of the Ponys' most impressive pop hooks, but its presence here does little to reassure listeners who're anxious to learn whether the group's most exciting work lies before them or behind them.

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