Punks on Mars Bad Expectations

For decades, fundamentalist Christians have been advocating the censorship of television and blaming it as the main culprit to society’s degeneracy. Certainly, too much of it can numb kids into worthless parasites, and there’s a good chance most are digesting overwhelming amounts of fast-paced content without proper parental supervision. Ryan Howe, the guy behind Punks on Mars, must’ve been one of those kids mostly raised by the television, who never missed a block of after school sitcoms and sneaked to the family room television late at night to have a peak of all the late night fun. His debut full-length, Bad Expectations, blazes a hyperactive collage of power pop songs controlled by a channel surfer flipping through dozens of music-influenced images at lightning speed.

One of the first singles to come out of Howe’s Punks on Mars project was a seven inch that contained the track Shout Your Lungs Out, a rollicking cover of the memorable kids anthem performed by everyone’s fictitious Beetle cartoon knockoffs The Beets. They weren’t “real” in a literal sense, a fabrication in a writer’s mind, but for a kid it must’ve been as real as it gets. So to imply that the Beets were an influence on him holds some ground, and even if it were strictly a nudge to his youth, there’s no question that kids programming usually serves as an entryway to one’s developing taste in music. How else could you logically explain a sold out Pete & Pete cast reunion, a reboot of Boy Meets World for a new generation, or the current all-around phenomenon of Yo! Gabba Gabba?

Howe is so enamored with pop culture in Bad Expectations that he surrenders to it, eager to see what surprises are in store beneath each dot pattern of static. The thirty-second logo ID of Bad Expectations comes in the form of Overture, a space-y, psychedelic opener that welcomes its guests into a magic kingdom filled with all kinds of thrills and joy. To which Chandelier follows with a full blast, mod punk groove and a chugging sonic battery of animated echoed vocals and histrionic licks. Howe handles his influences with an obsessive-compulsive eye, and he rolls them up into a sugary cinnamon bun in Hey! Tiffany, which starts like an advert to a classic teenybopper radio station. And then it lifts off into space with pure guitar riff mongering, managing to reference both the stop-and-go guitar crunch of Pictures of Lily with the same campy, sonic swirl heard throughout the film Xanadu.

The most palpable example of Howe’s affinity to balance kitsch with commanding pop hooks can be heard on She’s a Glitterpunk, a stratospheric pop jam that could be the perfect opener to a made-up diorama recital. You could imagine him assembling paper figures of his dream supergroup: Mac Bolan, Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie, and the rhythm section of ELO donning Devo hats with special guest Tom Verlaine playing all together in front of a galactic audience. It’s like Howe can’t really make a partisan distinction between all pop elements that were coming together in the mid to late seventies. He arranges manic, simple pop tunes with youthful reverence – the sweetly sweet piano bounce of The Sad Toy ebbs some phasered guitars a la T Rex, yet its muggy British slang about playing the radio and pop licks has its ties closer to the lightweight bubblegum frolics of the Bay City Rollers.

A music analyst may infer Howe as some sort of current-day prodigal rock historian, the son of a new wave-flailing baby boomer with troves of dusty records stacked in milk crates. But it’s also fair to say that his pop knowledge could stem from what’s he’s exclusively learned from the small screen, of how music cross-breeds into the public image and takes a whole new meaning. If Bad Expectations is a bit messy and sounds as haphazard as an early XTC record, it shouldn’t mean that he’s a neurotic connoisseur of the late seventies. Punks on Mars like to play make-believe, transforming their collection of ideas into the funnest, most addictive pop romp the new wave era seemed to forget. For a little over half an hour we’re tuning into their variety show, and they pull all the stops out to make sure you to stick to their channel.