They've got merit badges in rocking
Boyskout - Secrets
Boyskout - Jesse James
First of all, the pedant in me has to point out that the yellow bandanas the band are frequently seen wearing (eg, on the spash page of their site) are Cub Scout bandanas not Boy Scout ones. Same deal for the navy blue uniform shirts. I'll forgive them the faux pas though because of their otherwise total awesomeness.
Their song "Back to Bed" was included in my recent, monster SXSW post so you ought to be at least a little familiar with them if you're a loyal reader of this site. Their album, School of Etiquette (buy it.), has spent a lot of time in my playlist lately though and I noticed that there were a few more tracks from them on their site, so I figured they deserved a little more attention here.
Anyone writing about music faces the basic dilemma of trying to convey a sound with written words. There's necessarily going to be some loss of signal converting between mediums like that. Frequently, we end up resorting to comparing a band to some combination of previous, better known bands that readers may already be familiar with. This also gives the writer a good opportunity to namedrop obscure, influential artists, thus demonstrating their obviously superior indie cred. It also allows the writer to go wild concocting strange and humorous situations to explain the combination. I feel a little guilty every time I do it. It's kind of cliche, but it's not easy to write about music for very long without occasionally pulling it out as a weapon of last resort.
With Boyskout, the comparisons seems to be unavoidable. Here are some excerpts from various reviews culled off their site:
"Boyskout kind of sounds like a less accessible Elastica, with a shot of The Clash and a dash of Blondie added for good measure."
"If Elastica and Le Tigre were able to have children, then they would have a boy. After this child became old enough, he would become a Boyskout."
"... combine the exciting guitars of Elastica with the danceable electronic sound of Le Tigre and a little bit of the eerieness of Portishead"
"Boyskout sound like early Cure (Boys Don't Cry and Seventeen Seconds specifically mixed with a dash of The Sundays."
"she sounds like she's twisting Robert Smith and Harriet Wheeler through a tight keyhole"
"If some CBGB's Frankenstein had managed, circa 1977, to transplant Patti Smith's sensibility into Blondie's garage-band pop, the result would have sounded something like BoySkout's "School of Etiquette.""
"the delicious mix of post punk guitars, synthesizers and sexy recless vocals will have you thinking Chrissie Hynde, Sleater Kinney or even Joy Division.
"Hints of virtually every major influence from the early eighties can be heard here; The Cure, Siouxie and the Banshees, Devo, Kim Gordon.you name it.
"the band foremost calls to mind Berlin and lesser-known trapped-in-the-'80s girl bands like Transvision Vamp and Missing Persons and '90s New Wave revivalists Elastica."
"Boyskout perfectly intermingles the flesh-tingling musical menageries of Siouxsie & The Banshees, Romeo Void, Missing Persons, Blondie, and Slant 6 with a distinctive 21st century edge"
You get the picture.
Luckily, we've got this whole "mp3 blog" thing going on now which means I can just recommend that you listen to the mp3s and we can avoid the whole awkward mess. I think we're all better off this way.