Have you ever listened to something, and got the feeling that what you're listening to is a joke that you don't get the punchline to? That's what listening to the new self-titled from Pennsylvanian group Lickgoldensky is like. It's not that the music is particularly bad, but it just seems that there's something missing, something that will make it all make sense.

The band's music is basically your standard hardcore template, with a lot of unpredictability and randomness added into the mix. It's impossible to deny that the band is strikingly original; I've never heard anything that's quite like this before. Unfortunately, as bands like Hella show us, just because a band is steadfastly original, it doesn't necessarily follow that they're actually good. This is the trap that Lickgoldensky have fallen into, while it's impossible to fault their creativity, their music is just too bizarre and avant-garde to actually work well.

Structurally, the music is quite similar to that found on the band's debut album, with spastic songwriting and grating noise that sounds refreshingly different, given this genre's reputation for pallid uniformity. It's somewhat disappointing that the band hasn't upgraded their sound markedly from last year's "Beautiful Sounds of Lickgoldensky", which does damage their credibility as a highly original band somewhat. Still, if you didn't manage to pick up that album (and it wasn't locally released in this part of the world anyway), all of this should be new to you.

It's hard to explain on paper just what all of this sounds like though. The vocals range from clear-cut hardcore screams to occasional rapping and other bizarre noises that sound like they couldn't have physically come from a human voicebox. The guitar riffs range from, again, standard hardcore fare, to stuff that sounds more like metal or punk. It's obvious that Lickgoldensky know what they're doing with their various musical instruments, because while the handling of the music is not spectacular, it's very professional and competent.

You can't fault Lickgoldensky on their ideas, or on their intent, but they're let down by the fact that their ideas are just a little too bizarre to translate to truly good music. It feels like anathema to suggest that the band should make their music a little more closer to the mainstream than they are, but unfortunately, as it is, the band is just a little too peculiar to keep your attention.