The Mellow Dees continue their streak of unpredictability with their decidedly belligerent new offering.
I’m an album kind of guy. This whole advance-singles business has always been iffy to me. But as a music sleuth it does pique my fancy.
To my mind, pre-album releases serve as cookie crumbs that lead to the evil witch’s house.
If the band is a spirited devotee of a genre or form, you can bet the crumbs line up perfectly: a dead-giveaway trail even the dourest amateur detective would figure out instantly.
That trail isn’t so easy to track, in a manner of speaking, for supergroup The Mellow Dees. Debuting with a baroque-kundiman hybrid (“Lamán”), they then tried their hand at pop-punk by way of sing-song New Wave (“Runnin’”).
I’m happy to share that streak of unpredictability stays with today’s outing: the decidedly belligerent “Amber Alert.” To paraphrase the band’s self-assessment, it’s Pat Benatar-brand rock crossed with the propulsive rhythms of Yano’s “Tsinelas.”
If that isn’t a random cross-pollination of otherwise incompatible nuts and bolts, I don’t know what is. But as for this writer, it’s another curious case of warring styles triumphing over apparent incongruencies.
Despite her dream-pop pedigree, for instance, singer Melody del Mundo displays a newfound vigor that, I would hazard a guess, perhaps wasn’t absent in her old work, but was kept latent because the canvas was inconsistent with the paint (if that makes sense).
Guitar whiz Nievera, in a similar fashion, sheds his blues-lick-churning skin for something more visceral, more emotive, more urgent.
Drummer Wolf Gemora isn’t entirely out of his element here, and while he isn’t typically associated with gothic-imbued punk drivers, his signature revved-up cadence is a glass-sandal fit here.
The Mellow Dees’ new track is an impressionistic rhapsody on greed and narcissism, and if you think it rings out like hollow vitriol, that’s probably by design. I mean, composure in verbiage—and for that matter, texture and arrangement—isn’t the defining quality of punk rock.
Curiously, “Amber Alert” is the English reimagining of a still-forthcoming companion single. I can already hear it in my mind’s ear, and I know the sharp phonemes of the mother tongue will probably give it a raunchier edge, but—given how these guys are as unpredictable as unpredictable gets—I won’t hold my breath.
“It’s a total break from our other songs [because] it’s closer to punk,” the band shares with internal label publicity. “We are getting closer to the album launch and we’re very excited!”
Listen to “Amber Alert” today.