Kill Rock Stars has done a fairly good job of adapting their roster to a post-riot-grrl world, and much of their expansion has been with bands like
Mocket, who add a healthy dose of synth primitivism and futuristic deconstruction to their punk roots. Very much like
the Scissor Girls or
Kicking Giant (whose Rachel Carns appears on Pro Forma),
Mocket begins with this fractured punk aesthetic, but adds farfisas, casios, and stitched-together drum programming. Such arrangement culminates in a jerky, robotic feel that's even more polished and fully realized on Pro Forma than on the band's two previous LPs. Some of the album's tracks purely rock (the amazing "Monitress," or "Spot-For-Best-Vision," which seems to give "Walk Like an Egyptian" a serious deconstruction), while other tracks rely on the band's idiosyncracies to create an odd, mechanistic burble ("Spelling Effect," which truly does sound like a strange industrial machine operating). The result is akin to the overall aesthetic of
Ninety Nine, only much more aggressive -- and at its best (which is most of the record) Pro Forma adds something entirely valuable to this general vein of indie rock. Even apart from this, the record simply rocks in the appealingly slanted way that only truly fractured indie and punk can. ~ Nitsuh Abebe