CD Review
Artist: Creature
Title: No Sleep At All
Label: Universal
Released: March 4^th 2008

3 ½ Stars

Reviewed By: Kindah Mardam Bey

If you missed the bolshy pop-punk of the B52s I highly recommend you spend a little time with Creature. A Montreal based band consisting of Momma and Poppa style couplings (boy/girl,boy/girl) are poised to help you dance the night away. Their album No Sleep At All is a retro-sensation of historical reverence. Creature respects their punk-pop, rock-dance party roots that have all the ‘be' and ‘wannabe' hitting the newly polished dance floor. With music full of wit, whimsy and almost playful voyeurism cats a light into a window of the past.

You could dance to tracks like ‘Brigitte Bardot' all night, that are saucy and lush with tartly musical segways and the chorus hums of the album title ‘No Sleep At All,' and the comment ‘would you say no to Brigitte Bardot.' A lot of really great music came out of England in the 90s that was just under the surface of mainstream, and if you dug a little deeper back then, you were usually able to find bands like Creature. The track ‘Kandahar' rings of rave music in a rhythmic and eloquently subliminal texture of sound. It ends up that Creature are quite politically charged, and listening to the lyrics on ‘(Last Days Of) America' is a rather sobering conversation cut and pasted to a deliciously pernicious track.

Possibly Creature's greatest asset is their ability to smoothly go from on type of music to another without any wrinkles in the fabric of sound. I have a certain strain of my family who can speak multiple languages and often in a single sentence they will blend three languages effortlessly; Creature's music from pop to rock to funk to punk to jazz, all within a single song, reminds me of that capability. Creature should buy stocks in layering as ‘No Sleep At All' is both playful and wrought with statement.  
 

Alive
Sugarplum
Pop Culture
Brigitte Bardot
Property
Kandahar
(Last Days Of) America
Love Song
Pay Up
It's Over
Star