Elastica- The Menace

I bought Elastica's debut album in 1998, three years after the hubub over the band had died down considerably. I was not aware that they had released a mostly-forgotten second album until 2004 or so, which was a full three years after the band had broken up. Suffice it to say that I was never on the blade's edge when it came to Elastica. That's probably why I didn't toss their albums out like everyone else in the world seemed to do. I wasn't even buying their albums until everyone else in the world started tossing them out.

The Menace continues what Elastica started. It's still quite angular and raw, but The Menace brings a lot more sonic textures to the table than Elastica did. For example, "Miami Nice" sounds like nothing else in the Elastica catalog. It could easily be a Factory Records track. "My Sex" is practically Bjork-ish. Like I said, Elastica's debut sounded a lot like Blur but with girls and harder rocking. The Menace is still like girlyrock Blur on many of the tracks, but it also strays from the formula on a few tracks.

All in all The Menace is about par for the course as far as Elastica albums go. I don't dig it nearly as much as I dug their self-titled debut, but I still dig it enough to use the word, "dig" four times in a single sentence. Dig?