Sub Pop
2008
CSS
Donkey
About This Album
After delivering an acclaimed debut, bands sometimes try to "improve" their follow-up with a more sophisticated approach that, all too often, ends up overpowering what was appealing about their music in the first place. Cansei de Ser Sexy's self-titled first album was a glorious D.I.Y. hash of chunky guitars, cheap synths, and Lovefoxxx's brashly sexy vocals, and its rawness just made it more bracing. The band's vivid sound seemed indelible, but its second album, Donkey, proves otherwise. CSS' guitarist Adriano Cintra produced this album as well as CSS, but Donkey sounds much more polished; though Mark "Spike" Stent mixed these songs, his work with artists like Björk suggests that this album's more generic sound isn't his fault. "Let's Reggae All Night"'s ultra-simple riffs, buzzing synths, and pidgin song title aim to recapture CSS' appeal, but fall flat in Donkey's cleaner surroundings; "Give Up" and the stream-of-consciousness party meditation "Jager Yoga" deliver the outlines of catchy songs, but don't fill them in with memorable hooks. Strangely, for a good chunk of Donkey, the band separates the messy mesh of guitars and keyboards that made CSS so much good dirty fun.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,5,8 and 11)

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