Ice Cream Spiritual

We Say...

Review by J. Edward Keyes

Ponytail is the sound of ecstasy: tall exclamation points of guitar, mad rambunctious percussion and wild-eyed ululations, an enormous blast of shocking pink bouncing off the walls and shooting up toward the sun. It's absolute happiness, a drill boring straight down into the human id, recording everything it finds.

You could call it no wave if it wasn't so bright-eyed and busting with joy. Old-time noiseniks embraced chaos as a weapon, but Ponytail are more interested in hugging than haranguing. The guitars prick like apostrophes, skipping across the top of songs, the drums are hollow and throbbing, tribal rhythms from some Martian colony. It's like a deconstructed Life Without Buildings: wild scrambles of sound that wild-out, wobble and collapse. Scrambles of guitar briefly kick out into stern, linear solos, then set back scrambling again, loose and playful and eager as young puppies.

It's singer Molly Siegel who's the chief catalyst here. Possessing a voice somewhere between a baby Björk and a baby banshee, she pouts, huffs, yips and ha-ha-ha's all over these songs. There are no words, just whoops, all of them bubbling over with exhilaration. As the album progresses, Siegel comes to serve as a kind of over-sugared band leader: she spends the front half of "7 Souls" cackling and shrieking amid swinging fists of guitar; but then, at the halfway mark, she lets out a triumphant "Houyya houyaaa!" and the whole thing suddenly changes tempo, pogo-sticking instead of marauding, falling obediently in line behind Siegel's drawn-out yawp.

You've got to buy into Siegel's vocalizations not as empty yammering but as a kind of secular version of speaking in tongues. When the spirit moves her, she has to testify, and her testimony comes out as great euphoric babbling.

The closest she gets to coherent speech is at the end of the marvelous "Sky Drool," where she coos "Ooh baby, ooh, ooh" just before a pair of bright guitar phrases signal to sit down, the ride's about to begin. Sure enough, the tornado takes off again: guitars spiraling up and up, tossing around a drum kit, tangling up a bunch of staccato bass notes. And there's Siegel flailing around in the center, eyes gleaming, grinning broadly and hollering, "Oooowwabba! Oooowabbba! Oooooo!" You never understand a word, but you know exactly what she means.