Moonrats @ Knitting Factory Front Bar, 2/22

Could he have seen it coming? Pretty Girls Make Graves is shaking its death rattle on a last stretch of gigs before its imminent breakup, but ex-guitarist Nathan Thelen had the prescience to leave PGMG back in 2004, before they began writing and recording the underwhelming Elan Vital. Thelen'''s new trio Moonrats plugs his old band'''s post-punk into a malfunctioning reverb pedal, then basically plays through the entire Blonde Redhead catalog. The band'''s basslessness (just guitar, keyboard and drums) only increases the head-scratching suspicion that Moonrats was listening to Misery Is a Butterfly a whole lot when they were recording the tracks on their Myspace page, but it also adds a pleasant sonic emptiness that undercuts the band'''s tendencies toward grandiose songwriting. That combined with the slightly off female yelping of Aska Matsumiya (a female Japanese yelper '' another BR connection!) means you have to let a few things go if you want to take Moonrats seriously, but perhaps a band that describes its sound as ''"korean bbq, DIM SUM, wildabeasts (sic) savory emotional chili''" doesn'''t care too much whether you take them seriously, hmmm? (ER)
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