REVIEW: Money Mark, Push The Button (Polygram)
- Tim Mohr
As keyboardist for the Beastie Boys, Money Mark definitely has the proper credentials to create cross-category, eccentric music with a mix of live and electronic intruments--but Money Mark consistenly transcends his mere name-dropping marketability to put together startingly original records.
Following on the heels of the successful re-release of his "Hand in Your Head" single last Spring, Money Mark has made an entire album of loose but structured songs with flourishes of garage guitars, vintage keyboards, and both live and programmed beats. Truly surprising, however, given some of his obtuse early Mo' Wax singles, is how much each song is just that: a self-contained, finite, song with vocals and a chorus.
Push The Button can be compared to records by Space or the Lighting Seeds, bands using computers to make organic pop music. Perhaps an even better comparison would be to Beck, though Money Mark refrains from harnessing as much hip-hop intensity as Beck sometimes does. Take Beck's "Where It's At," add some amateur guitar strumming and sunny vocals with lines like "tomorrow will be like today," and you have constructed a Money Mark track.
The music on Push The Button is very inclusive--the songs are so good that they immediately incite singing-along, and the arrangements take in a wide variety of instrument sounds and stylistic genres. Though it would be too exclusionary to label the music, it is important to stress that the record is cohesive. The genre-spanning style does not subtract from the internal consistency of the album or the structural integrity of individual songs. Push The Button is exemplary of the post-Britpop, post-alternative, post-techno confusion now afoot--Money Mark has used this to his advantage and made one of the strongest albums of the year.
