(Arista)
The Ramones meet Weezer on the self titled debut album from the Santa Barbara, California trio known as Nerf Herder.
The song which thrust Nerf Herder into the national spotlight is "Van Halen". Played coast-to-coast (and a favorite of Howard Stern's), this track takes laments the David Lee Roth/Sammy Hagar debacle through the eyes of one of VH's devoted fans. A cute novelty hit, this is the type of track that would normally wind up on a Dr. Demento compilation years down the line.
However, Nerf Herder deftly avoids the novelty trap, and has produced a collection of simple, but eminently hummable, songs. The key track here is the rollicking "Sorry". A tale of an obsessive apologetic ex-boyfriend, this typifies the "geek rock" attitude which most recently came to light on Weezer's debut album. With "Sorry", lead singer Parry progresses from the realistic ("Sorry I puked up on your bedspread") to the slightly ludicrous ("Sorry I jacked off outside your window / While you were sleeping / I thought you'd never know").
But whereas Weezer's lyrics skirt gently around the subject, Nerf Herder's come full strength at the listener, talking to the geek inside nearly everyone (at one time or another). Parry tells us on "Golfshirt" that "I'm not the one you want to be seen with" and reassures himself with the knowledge that "When you're tired of being hurt, you'll long for the comfort of my golfshirt".
Nerf Herder's name comes from a line in "The Empire Strikes Back"
- and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) appears in the video for "Sorry".With ten songs packed into just over thirty minutes, the joke doesn't grow old too quickly. So even when the lyrics resort to material which would be better found in Weird Al Yankovic's outtake pile ("Nose Ring Girl" - the only song to truly miss the mark), it's soon over, to take the listener on another journey through bouncy tunes such as "Down On Haley" and "Annalee".
If Nerf Herder were still on an independent label, critics would be spooging over them - but now that they're on a major label with their simple guitar chords, it might be a different story. Nerf Herder is likely to draw widely differing reactions of love or hate from music fans. But the one thing that they're unlikely to do is generate indifference.
