Medium: Album
Stimulus: Killola – Let’s Get Associated
Anno: 2010
What one will get out of this album depends on where one starts. The titles which seemingly demand first play are the dirty pop tunes “She’s a Bitch” and “I Wanna See Your Dick.” I advise avoiding the impulse to start here. There’s plenty of good work on Let’s Get Associated, but when vocalist Lisa Rieffel tries to come off as a drawling tramp, the whole song suffers.
Killola is at its best when it keeps its pop sensibilities firmly contained within rock structures. The best examples of this superior approach come in the album’s snarling opener, “Mid-Day Rebel,” and “The Doctor and His Son,” a fast-paced dance tune reminiscent of Aimee Echo and TheSTART. Rieffel’s vocals are much better in these two, but her best contributions happen in the tracks in which Killola takes things down a notch, particularly in the stately march of “Nothing Man.”
Let’s Get Associated is at times guilty of trying too hard to be cool (and it should be noted that the track “Gimme, Gimme” appropriates bursts of the Tetris theme in such an attempt). Yet when the shots at manufacturing street cred wear out, what’s left is a quite competent album and a vocalist who can hold her own with any others in the pop-rock genre. I’d like to hear more of that confidence.
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