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Lesser Demons

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My Teenage Stride

 
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Lesser Demons
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Avg: 3.5 (48 ratings)

An eMusic Exclusive EP from Brooklyn's best Kiwipop band.

  • We Say...

    On last year's Ears Like Golden Bats Brooklyn's My Teenage Stride, which for four years had essentially been a codename for Jedediah Smith, finally felt like an honest-to-goodness band. The group's first two records felt oddly hermetic, the product of one man, a four-track and a room with drawn shades. Ears, though, was gutsy and expansive, full of songs that seemed to ricochet out of the speakers. If there was a problem with the record — and that's an awfully big "if" — it was that Smith was sometimes a bit too indebted to his musical predecessors.

    One listen to "Theme from Suicide," the barnburning lead track on Lesser Demons, and it's clear that MTS has finally settled into their own. The EP offers a brisk, bracing run through all the tricks that the Teens do so well. There's a grim weeper (the marvelous "Red Nurse"), a jittery floor-filler ("Skin Lieutenant," which could be a distant cousin to Ears' "To Live & Die in the Airport Lounge") and a song that combines the best elements of both ("The Loud Confessor"). They’ve gotten more confessional, too: written while Smith was broke and living out of his studio, there's a gnawing desperation to much of Demons that blackens the corners of even the brightest songs. "When their lips are dry/ and you're dead in their eyes/ You focus on sanity." With each outing, My Teenage Stride work their way a bit further into the grand pantheon of pop miserabilists. If they dance, it's only to keep from crying.

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