Marcy Playground
Shapeshifter

THE REVIEW

Part of the global music critics have always dismissed this album without much consideration, whereas for some, myself included, it represents a good musical production situated on the heavily saturated borderline that separates the hardest rock from the most "sugary" pop.

Shapeshifter is the second album by Marcy Playground, a band composed of the eccentric John Wozniak (vocals, guitar), Dylan Keefe (bass), Dan Rieser (drums).

The fundamental characteristic of this album is that it never bores: there is no track that could make the listener lose interest and "skip" to the next. The sounds and writing style of both the lyrics and the music are varied: it ranges from grunge screamed until the throat burns mixed with pop-Beatlesque melodies (sound of today’s Vines) in "Wave Motion Gun", to the acoustic ballad of just guitar and voice, to stranger yet highly successful sound experiments, like the yodeling shouted during the powerful "It's Saturday" (the single).

The approach of the album to the topics addressed in the lyrics is surely that of irony (I won't quote a single line because I greatly dislike copying verses), whether it’s about a pigeon farm located inside a boy’s body (Pigeon Farm), or about love for a girl brought by a winter storm "All The Lights Went Out", the most successful song along with "Never" (which has a musical structure vaguely similar to "You Know You're Right" by Nirvana, though less angry).

The Marcy Playground sound exactly like Super Furry Animals should sound!
The album is filled with original elements, like the cartoon villain voice inserted in "Secret Squirrel" under a great guitar riff, or the exceptional band videos from '97 to '99 included in the CD, where the direction is truly excellent both for the sets and for the stories crafted to accompany the tracks.
Wozniak's voice is beautiful: gritty in the harder tracks but also simple and melodic when necessary, but above all, it's not bent by any strange dialectal inflection... in short, you can understand everything even without reading the lyrics.

Great album, great musical ideas, great videos, in short... recommended!