Band : Life in a Blender
Album Reviewed : It Likes Me
Produced By : Fang Records

For about eight months I worked as a DJ for the local student radio. To get the job, what with me not being a student and all, I ended up helping out a lot around the studio. One of the tasks given to me was to help sort through the boxes and boxes of old CD’s left behind from the station’s previous incarnation some four years back.

Now, I have a belief that almost all extended play albums have at least one song or portion worth listening to. Okay, sure, there are those artists who manage to cut an actual CD despite having no skill or talent or merit or fun at all, but I think they’re the minority, the extreme minority. Listen to most compact discs (or records, or tapes blah blah blahb) and you’ll find at least one song you wouldn’t mind hearing a second time.

In this vein I would shuttle many of these CD’s back to work with me to listen to while I coded. I’d generally shoot for more obscure things, bands I’d never heard of, things that looked particularly odd, that sort of thing. This was how I discovered Life in a Blender.

Who is Life in a Blender? Beats the hell out of me. It appears to be focused on one guy, Don Ralph, the center for a very strange and discordant sound. It’s hard to compare them or categorize them since their music, for all that it’s generally loud, somewhat flat of key and grating (I call it punk, but all people tend to lump most unspecified rock they like into whatever category they claim they are. All goths call all music they like goth, all the slackers call it grunge, all the punks call it punk, and so on, excepting of course your average qualified critic who has all this name calling crap down.) they actually cover a few different Genres. ‘Guns’, as an example, has a humorous drawling twang and sounds kind of like bad country, ‘Planes’ is a sadder tune that’ll make you think of Radiohead, ‘Excelsior 2000’ is a little clip playing on the ‘fifties commercial of the future’ theme and ‘Vertical Hold’ may cause you to think of surf music spoiled.

What impressed me most about the band is their ability to remain generally humorous while at the same time indulging in actual poetic imagery, a feat increasingly lost on humorous alt bands. Many of their songs, while being outwardly silly, also can convince you that they might actually mirror aspects of your own existence in a loose, hazy sense. Life in a Blender is your brain on drugs, introspection without the focus or self delusion of sober, lucid thought.

Life in a blender isn’t easy music to find. I had to go online ( http://www.fangrecords.com/ ) to find them outside of that box in the radio station, but they’re well worth it. The closest thing you’re going to find to them for the listening is live Dead Milkmen, so you’re going to enjoy the variety they add as well as the ability to shock and annoy your friends, although most people hated Life in a Blender a lot less than I expected, and virtually everyone had at least one song (besides Excelsior 2000) that they really enjoyed.

I have yet to hear either of their other albums, but I’m looking forward to getting the chance.