Goddamn the sunlight. I didn't drink so much as one flute of champagne on New Year's Eve and still I woke up with a fierce-ass headache. The Shiv ain't helping. The cover art for Short Order Crook is almost enough to seal the deal and bring the vomit on. Lucky for you, the graphics on the back of the album are not on display here. Since you were kind enough to ask, though, I'll tell you about it.

Behind the song titles (rendered in the sorriest Commodore 64 font) lies a sickly-blue hued photograph of a virus attacking some cells, or bacteria replicating, or some such shit. It's almost as atrociously ugly as the cover composition. My guess is it's a signifier for Science. Man, that's subtle. I think I even see a sort of War of the Worlds-type scene through the Photoshopped blur of the album cover. Whatever it is, it looks how I feel.

The lead-off track, "Under the Guise of Religion," begins pleasantly enough, serving up a solid half-minute of gloom/doom bass and guitar noise that teases you into expecting a 2000 version of something off Confusion is Sex. Predictably, it doesn't quite turn out that way. Fans of the FSU Seminoles, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Atlanta Braves, and any other Indian bemascotted sports team I may have forgotten will surely disagree with me, but that retarded war chant they sing while swinging their arms, tomahawk-style, does not make a good guitar riff. (Don't pretend you don't know the tune I'm talking about.)

Thankfully, all sports venue stylings have vanished by the next track, "Grandma's Permission." The song, like the majority of Short Order Crook, sounds like a poor man's Satisfact, or a homeless man's Brainiac, trying to their damnedest to sound psychedelic. But, hey, not so fast-- it's not always as terrible as it sounds. The guitar work through much of the record is, as the Shiv's Chicago Reader press quote put it, "promising." Angularity, sparseness and dissonance in guitar playing are the musical expressways to my heart, and they're here in spades. Too often, though, the Shiv detour off into the land of wah-wah, seemingly baited there by the holy grail of atmospherics and quirk.

When they manage to resist, the guitar can be dead on. "Listen, Frank" boasts the album's best guitar work, and is perhaps the strongest cut overall. The Frank in question could be Black, though it's hard to tell since the Shiv are one of those "if they want to know the lyrics, they'll put on the headphones and figure them out" sorts of bands. In fact, the song sounds like a poor man's Satisfact doing a poor man's Pixies. Naturally, Mike Marchio and Jeff Moore's vocals won't ever make the hair on your arms stand up, and you probably won't remember their melodies, but to their credit, neither do they get in the way.

Plenty of other things do, though. "Beirutabegah" is the Shiv being, like, trippy. Or experimental, maybe. Some of the lyrics are sung in French, and they even throw in samples and decorative turntable scratching! This is the Shiv at their jammiest, corniest worst, and they'd probably do well to avoid indulging this side of themselves on future records.

On the other hand, the title track, by far the strangest, is also the most successful. Not best, mind you, but successful. They incorporate several disparate influences-- Gang of Four basslines, keyboard noodling, tin drums, and a dub/dancehall Casio drum patch-- into a cohesive whole that manages not to sink under the weight of its silly, unlikely pedigree.

As the album progresses from here, the Gang of Four thread becomes more pronounced; the guitar periodically veers off into trebly funk strums, the singing gets talkier, and the atmospherics are more toned down. "Conversation Whore" finds the Shiv trying their hand at thick D.C. post-punk with remarkably tepid results. Then, fleeing the scene of the crime, they pawn their Dischord catalogs and warp to the opposite end of the musical universe. By the time "Get Up and Dance" opens with tapping cymbals and Steely Dan chords, they've taken up impersonating the Culture Club. Though, I must confess that, behind the snickers, I actually kind of enjoyed it.

While I'd be lying if I said Short Order Cook is gonna see a lot of the inside of my CD player, there's enough here to keep me intrigued. With a little more stylistic focus and some restraint with the guitar effects, the Shiv would find much more success combining the many musical influences that tug at them from all different directions. And it'll help if the artwork isn't quite as stomach-turning the next time around.

-Camilo Arturo Leslie