Review
by Ed Bumgardner

If you like: Soft Cell playing Kraftwerk with a little Devo deviance on the side
Song to download: "Alligator Missions"


Gil Mantera's Party Dream - Mantera on keyboards and Ultimate Donny on vocals and guitar - likes to party like it's 1983. The duo's latest clump of strange fruit, Bloodsongs, is the sound of impassioned cheapness, the blip-and-squiggle of early '80s synth-pop. The Casio keyboards, Vocorders, gliding and sputtering synthesizers, cheap drum machines and fuzzy guitars are driven, like laconic cattle jolted by a high-voltage prod, by the hyper-emotional wailing of singer Ultimate Donny. Judging from these soul-baring expressions of personality disorder, he may as well upgrade to Penultimate Donny. Nobody can top these vocal performances, at least in this admittedly odd setting.

The disc is cleverly assembled, the songs are anachronistic and catchy, the lyrics as bizarre as they are evocative. And despite the disc's blatant nod to a bygone New Wave era, it all sounds equal parts futuristic and classic, oddly alluring, certainly not of this time, but so retro that it could be hip again at any minute - and that's not a threat.

You've probably heard it all before, but it's nice - the same, but just different enough.