Everything that is old may be new again, but more often than not it is also mashed-up, rearranged and turned into something that isn't really new but has that gloss. Thus
the Lotterboys' debut effort, which slots alongside outfits from the DFA label to the
Electric 6 as something which imagines a permanent 1978 to 1982 where everybody ran into each other at a loud party and got down. No bad thing at all, of course, and if the general concept by now is its own established cliché,
Animalia presents its own spin on the matter. The song that might yet get the most attention is a cover of
Black Sabbath's "Iron Man," which ends up with the same triumphal dancefloor not a million miles away from the
Scissor Sisters' slink through
Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb." The blatantly obvious influence on the singing throughout, not that the group would ever deny it, is
P-funk -- when Mack Goudy, Jr. starts busting out the wiggy chants right from the start with "Star Whores" the connection couldn't be any clearer if the bassline started turning into something from
Bootsy Collins. But the rhythms are more monolithic and straightforward, industrial disco in all but name, resulting in an often-invigorating tension between Fetisch and Shapemod's arrangements and the singing (or at times speaking, thus the opening monologue on "Involvement"). Still, said monolithic approach locks the album down into a one-note approach that it can't quite overcome, elements like the horn blasts on "Blazer" and the guitar riffs on the title track aside (though the concluding "Wired and Tired" kicks everything into hilarious jokey garage rock/drug/funk territory). There's been much worse, though, and heard in isolation each track kicks all the more strongly. ~ Ned Raggett