Xebra

First and foremost i would like to shamelessly promote my new band Breakfast. Our first show is Friday at 222 Ormsby in Pittsburgh. Unlike the shitty bands we review, my band is going to kick down some proverbial doors tomorrow night. We are opening for Elway, who is a pretty sweet. John Elway threatened to sue them which is really funny. It is going to be a wonderful time for all in attendance.

Now lets get to business. Xebra does not know how to spell. I think they were going for zebra, which for those who do not know, is a mammal that lives in Africa. Xebra appears to be an animal that looks like douche bags and is native to Tallahassee. The E.P. is entitled ANIMALPRACTICE. I guess that must have something to do with xebras or zebras or douche bags or whatever.

The first song is almost 8 minutes of assorted noise. Nothing happens for the first five minutes than they speed it up and try to go into something that resembles melody. It sounded pretty cool for about 20 seconds then they hit bad notes and introduced stupid electronic noises. It is all instrumental and really annoying. This hardly constitutes music. It is somewhere between noise and ambient music.

The second song is titled "In the Park (punk)" and as they luckily pointed out for I would have never guessed, is a punk song. Surprisingly a pretty good song. Granted, vocals are blown out and kind of hard to listen to, but we will ignore that for the sake of this review. This song reminds me of Joyce Manor a little bit. It starts pretty fast and has a long half time, breakdown part at the end.

The third song sucks. Xebra decided to switch the sound from noise to punk to some kind of shitty Jet cover band or something like that. It has a lot of crappy guitar solos and the singer keeps talking bout the ladies.

The forth song starts off like a Vampire Weekend song, but the crappy vocals come in and it sounds like a shitty Doors live recording. The song has a classic blusey rock feel with spaced out vocals.

I take what I said about last song starting like Vampire Weekend. This song really does. It is kind of quirky. The singer isn't doing the spaced out thing, he is much more toned down and it is dramatically better. There is some keys and blusey guitar parts so once again it has the doors thing going on.

Overall the band is a Doors rip-off with some Jet and Vampire Weekend influences. If that last sentence described a band you want to listen to; you are a dildo. Xebra is real unorganized. Sometimes they make music, other times they do not. The constant switch of genres is annoying. I really wanted to compare them to a zebra but it is not just black and white here with Xebra.

Xebra was a lot like Zebra Stripe gum. IT was pretty cool for a hot minute, but once the flavor is gone you are left with poo poo that resembles gum. 1/5

Now if you want to listen to a good band, I will see you tomorrow dildos.