Critic’s Choice

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 bands 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 Lopezs deadpan chorus of If I Wanted to Be Famous Id 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.