Means Lots of Treble (1996-1999)

The album title is entirely truthful: there's not a lot of low end on Gerty Farish's second full-length. It's not the whole story, though: Gerty Farish also means ultra lo-fi recording technology (most of this record sounds like it was recorded not on a cheap boombox like the early Mountain Goats LPs, but on a malfunctioning Dictaphone), super-brief song bursts (not a single one of these 22 songs reaches even the two-minute mark), an adenoidal vocalist hectoring unintelligibly over fuzztone guitars and cheap Casio-style keyboards, and loads and loads of geeky-art-punk attitude. A few individual tracks are fun — "Custom Cruiser" is a scrappy instrumental with a great keyboard hook, and it's hard not to love a song called "Vinyl Pants Move to New York to Wear Us," especially since it's got both a really charming melody and an excellent guitar riff — but even just 24-and-a-half-minutes of this sort of thing grows tiresome by the halfway point. Gerty Farish should mean "7" EPs only."