Art you can dance to: the wild, weird sounds of Tracy + the Plastics are fit for both booty shakers and performance art fans
Sara Marcus
Culture for Pigeon
* Tracy + the Plastics * Troubleman Unlimited
Is Tracy + the Plastics a queer electro band? A video project? High-concept performance art? All of the above. The Plastics’ Wynne Greenwood has been making the queer musical underground swoon for years, but this spring she hit the big time when she was picked for the prestigious Whitney Biennial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York. The latest Tracy + the Plastics album, Culture for Pigeon–which includes both a musical CD and a DVD version of her video performance–sheds some light oil wily this project so successfully crosses borders between high art and pop music.
Culture for Pigeon’s songs fit into the same electronic dance-punk mold as the project’s earlier work but with more complex rhythmic sensibilities and increasingly off-kilter beats. There’s a broader range of songs as well, from the understated, pretty “Big Stereo” to the industrial-sounding “Knit a Claw.”
Greenwood’s voice affects an eerie robotic vibrato in places, while on other songs it sounds gentle, wistful, or bluesy. And the production values are head and shoulders above the willfully loft debut album, 2001’s Muscler’s Guide to Videonics.
Don’t miss the DVD that comes with the new album, which has Greenwood playing three characters (including bandleader Tracy) and discussing “the lesbian creature as constantly disappearing,” only to find herself erased from the screen by a digitally created lavender blob.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Liberation Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
