When I was in grade four, I had a teacher named Ms. Sellers. Not exactly realizing what sex was all about, we all had the hots for her, largely because she had a habit of refusing to let a bra conceal what God had given her. Never mind the actual quality of these... things. We thought (in our grade- four logic) that with boobies like that, Ms. Sellers must have been some sort of crazy amazon woman, a sultry practionner of erotic bliss. Our man- devouring image of her was amplified by her somewhat brassy demeanor and this notion that outside the classroom she was breaking businessmen's hearts left and right. As the years passed on, Ms. Sellers finally settled down and married a guy called Mr. Anema. Her superwoman schtick faded in our judging gaze of adolescence.

Abnormals Anonymous often sounds like the background music to the way I imagined Ms. Sellers seducing me. This is both a good and bad thing. Sometimes this record oozes a kind of world- weary sensuality that's the type of desperately sexy stuff today's hipsters can really get into. Singer Sally Norvell and guitarist Kid Congo Powers (you may know him from his days with the Cramps, the Gun Club, or Nick Cave's Bad Seeds) have assembled a group of talented musicians, including one Mark Eitzel of American Music Club fame, and the band uses all its toys in full sonic effect. Songs like "Brother Jack," "Johnny in the Boudoir" and "Dark Eyes" are wonderfully sombre, sultry examples of orchestral pop. Weaving narratives of lust, death, and... uh, more lust, a curiously doomed ethic pervades.

The problem is that, like some attributes of Ms. Sellers, some songs aren't all that good. "Candy" and "The Last Word" kind of have a dorky harlequin romance sound to them. Occasionally, Norvell's voice carries a bit too much forced huskiness in it, as is the case on "Candy," and one can't help but think of badly- applied lipstick and foul- smelling breath mints. On Abornormals Anonymous, Congo Norvell display a habit of relying on attitude to get them through.

And like Ms. Sellers, it's sort of sexy. But it fades.

-Samir Khan