The Action Album!

Organ-bass-drums trio Oh My God manages to generate a lot of noise on their second self-released CD, The Action Album!. Keyboard player Iguana sets up most of the racket, playing his organ as if it were a heavily distorted electric guitar much of the time, though drummer Zach Nold is left plenty of space in the mix and singer Bill O'Neill drops in some bass guitar here and there. The result is still a spacious sound, but a frequently harsh one. The Chicago-based band seems to have been listening to a couple of decades' worth of Midwest art rock predecessors — including Devo, Pere Ubu, and Suicide — and in their lyrics they often take a quirky, ironic tone sometimes reminiscent of Steely Dan, that is, when they're not being deliberately obscure. The intention here is to create a unique context that requires no explanation beyond itself. Why do all the song titles and all the lines of the lyrics end in exclamation marks (except the ones that end in question marks)? Why do songs take sudden right angles halfway through and develop different (though still rudimentary) melodies? Because they do. On the last two tracks, "Letter 12/98!" and "Where Are We?," Oh My God dispenses with even a modicum of conventional musicality. The former track, which runs over ten minutes, finds O'Neill reciting a mundane letter before giving way to extended industrial sounds, while the latter alternates a solo piano figure with a sound reminiscent of a sonar blip. Oh My God is in no danger of reaching a mainstream audience with such work, but there is a more limited audience for the avant-garde that will enjoy it.