Pitchfork

Ah, the young, introverted male's bedroom. Home to countless hours of video games, classic rock albums, and sexual discovery-- it's no wonder "Paperboy", Jenna Jameson, and Ziggy Stardust blend together so seamlessly in the collective brain of many twenty-something males. New York five-piece Apes & Androids have got a particularly bad case of this phenomenon. So bad that on their debut album, Blood Moon, it's difficult to determine where the digital sci-fi fantasy ends and the IRL hot-blooded yearning begins. Never before has a stronger case been presented for a Nintendo Power swimsuit issue.

Riding a Mountain Dew high, Blood Moon never meets a dramatic pose it doesn't like. All your late-night movie marathon heroes are here in some incarnation, from Robocop to Rocky Horror, and the band's not afraid to reach into the gooey middles of gauche genres like glam rock or John Hughes soundtracks. Opener "Blood Moon I" acts as a movie trailer for the album, suspensefully playing monkey, spaceship, and horror scream sound effects before launching into the alpha dog strut of "Make Forever Last Forever".

Not that it's a surprise, but Moon's biggest slap-you-in-the-face moments come during the band's robo-Queen numbers. Although their itchy-finger synth arrangements wouldn't fly in any opera house, the neurotic arias on songs like "Hot Kathy" and "Doyle is Dead" feel like an accurate Information Age update of Freddy Mercury vocals. When their libidos spill over, those hyper vocals take on the glitchy plastic soul of Midnite Vultures or Hissing Fauna. "Golden Prize" pulls out all the stops, its melody hijacked by countless falsetto interruptions along with a cartoonish Arabian outro. There are even a few tender moments on the album, though they naturally come off more as tongue-in-cheek send-offs of 1980s sentimentality. "Nights of the Week" tackles the plight of the over-zealous party-goer, replete with a guitar riff modeled after "Every Breath You Take" and a touching reflection on college-aged burnout: "These are the nights of the week when you pull yourself out of bed."

The final third of Moon wades a little long in the soft stuff and loses the rest of the album's punch, but it could be so much worse. A&A have earned a reputation for garish stage outfits and dance party concerts, and we've seen bands like this too often overlook their music, practically beating the listener into partying with cheap gimmicks and shock jokes. Fortunately, these guys know they're cuter than they are shocking. Like equally goofy acts Junior Senior and Datarock, A&A find a happy medium between irreverence and ingenuity, doing their guilty pleasure touchstones a better service than today's deeper-browed bands ever could.