Eyeball Skeleton consists of brothers Charlie Brown (guitar) and J.J. Brown (bass), with their dad Bill Brown as producer and minder of the drum machine. The Brown boys are in elementary school, as evinced by song titles like "Spooky Mummy Case," "Flat Top Vampire," and "I Don't Eat Cereal on the Weekends." As instrumentalists, they're in that weird position where they're not untrained or inexperienced enough to be outsider-interesting along the lines of early
Half Japanese, but they're not anywhere near good, either. Similarly, the songs are appealingly goofy -- it's hard to go wrong with topics including bouncing apes and Cyclops girls -- and the brothers sing in unison with untrained bratty abandon, but the songs also tend to run their limited musical and lyrical ideas into the ground long before they're actually over.
Eyeball Skeleton are too endearing to actively dislike, but make no mistake: this is a gimmick record, and not really a particularly interesting one at that. ~ Stewart Mason