Shonen Knife: Brand New Knife

Shonen Knife always had a great gimmick: Throughout the '80s and early '90s, the trio of Japanese women played and sang giddy, breathlessly innocent, Ramones-style rock anthems about bicycles and gumdrops and rocket ships. Let's Knife, the band's 1993 major-label debut, was the slickest, loudest, most anthemic record of its career, but when the following year's disappointing Rock Animals failed to generate much commercial interest, Shonen Knife seemed to disappear. (A collection of miscellaneous outtakes and live tracks, The Birds & The B-Sides, came out a year ago, but that doesn't really count.) Three long years after Rock Animals, the group is back, and while Shonen Knife's amped-up, Ramones-inspired days seem over, what remains is an enticing, infectious pop-rock sound. The songs on Brand New Knife lack the ham-fisted guitar crunch and girly-girl gleefulness of Shonen Knife's most entertaining moments, but the band's more mannered arrangements still provide room for mile-wide hooks and awkwardly sung lyrics about Barbie dolls and E.S.P. Brand New Knife nicely proves that Shonen Knife is no mere kitsch spectacle, and even more surprisingly, it shows that maturity and a greater attention to songwriting needn't torpedo a silly band's entertainment value. And "Explosion!"—which surfaces both as Brand New Knife's lead song and one of the seven Japanese-language bonus tracks—is one of the most endearing pop songs of the young year.