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More About

• Chris Lopez
• Jeffrey Wiggens
• The Flaming Lips

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With the release of Sweet Bird of Youth, the Rock*A*Teens, Wednesday, November 29, at the 15th Street Tavern, with Kudzu Towers and Witter Cofield Conspiracy, again demonstrate that strange art sometimes comes from strange places. The band’s fifth full-length CD was recorded in its Cabbagetown, Georgia, home, and is a reverb-drenched, seasick opera starring Teens frontman Chris Lopez, who squawks and pleads his way through it all. This bird can sing, all right: Nineteen songs long, the album recalls the almost evangelistic, epic urgency of the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin. But where the Lips’ opus suggested a certain hopefulness, Sweet Bird of Youth is a dark, dark affair. The Rock*A*Teens seem to delight in sometimes diabolical combinations of words, sounds and meanings. Which explains, for example, their decision to mate a Southern-style doo-wop tune with Lopez’s deadpan chorus of “If I Wanted to Be Famous I’d Have Killed Someone by Now.” The irony is that the four-piece band — aided on its current tour by “keyboardist and wit” Jeffrey Wiggens — should be famous by now.