The Lot Six

Any seven-year-old will tell you: Lying is easy. Screw all that "What a tangled web we weave" crap. All you have to do is keep up that poker face, look people dead in the eye and -- most important -- believe your own bullshit.

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More About

• David Vicini
• The Mooney Suzuki
• Sonic Youth
• Rye Coalition
• Punk Rock

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Of course, the biggest rule of telling a successful fib is this: Never, ever try lying to your mom.

That said, the members of Boston's the Lot Six are big, fat, faking liars. Ask their moms. You can bet that when their precious little angels were in junior high, they were jamming Sonic Youth and Fugazi -- maybe Unwound if their big brothers were cool enough -- and dreaming of one day starting a band equally as artsy, ear-shattering and experimental. So how did these five young men wind up in one of the most blazing, balls-out rock-and-roll bands the 21st century has ever seen? Certainly not by trying to ape the smarmed-over sounds of Jet or the Mooney Suzuki, or even falling in line with the hammed-up cabaret of contemporaries like Rye Coalition or Vue. No, it's precisely the Lot Six's grounding in post-punk art rock that enables its music to leapfrog over the vast majority of garage bands and straight into the winner's circle. Major Fablesrips wide open with its first cut, the vicious "Autobrats," and just keeps gushing like a bloody-nosed hemophiliac. Although the flow is staunched a bit with "I Was You" and "Go to Sleep" -- back-to-back ballads that twist trombone, trumpet, guitar and piano into complicated shapes -- the tempo kicks back up as the album slides into "Die Polizei," an 88-second blitz of spit and middle fingers. Yeah, it's fast and loud. Yeah, singer David Vicini howls like a lab monkey about cash and whores and cigarettes. But underneath all the hairy, greasy trappings of rock are five brains quietly at work, sketching out riffs and arrangements as dense and balanced as trig equations. There's no doubt about it: The members of the Lot Six are lying through their teeth. Here's hoping they get away with it.