About ten years ago, I got to see the Monkees in concert. While I was sitting there, watching three of four 1960s television teen idols sing songs that everybody knew they were going to play, I got to thinking about what it must be like for a manufactured band to go on a reunion tour. By then, they'd abandoned the façade of playing their own instruments and settled for the pure sugar satisfaction of playing to the audience and putting on a show. Twenty years from now, somebody will probably wonder the same things about the Kidneythieves.

Produced by mainstream industrial heavyweight Sean Beavan, who boasts relationships with Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails, Trickster is the debut effort from the Kidneythieves. Borrowing their name from a popular urban legend, the Thieves is a collaboration of longtime wannabe singer Free Dominguez, and musician and industry pal Bruce Somers. But imagine Alanis Morissette taking over lead vocals for Marilyn Manson. But manufactured or not, it's good to hear female vocals fronting a band in a largely male dominated genre.

The Kidneythieves aren't as intolerable as some of the latest groups hopping on the hard- music bandwagon, but they still seem to be searching for their own identity; they haven't even got it together enough to go out on tour. But when they do finally make it out for a visit, it'd probably be better to see them this time around than next-- who knows what a concert ticket will cost in 2018?

-Skaht Hansen