Brainiac — Smack Bunny Baby
Qobuz reissue review (December 2023)
The wildly influential and tragic tale of Brainiac began when the group melted brains across the underground rock scene with the release of Smack Bunny Baby. Although this debut album was preceded by a handful of singles that began to foment the group’s legend, when the record was finally released in the summer of 1993, it immediately became the sort of talismanic “did you hear” album that excited and repelled listeners in equal measure. Leaning heavily on overdriven analog synths, unhinged vocal performances, and punk rock confrontationalism, Smack Bunny Baby is, ironically, the most traditional of all of Brainiac’s recordings, as the band would delve further and further into electronic abrasiveness as their career developed. However, in 1993, this album felt like a ferocious blast of retro-futurist intensity, harnessing the weirdo sci-fi garage punk of bands like Man or Astro-Man? with equal measures of Stereolab’s Moog fetishism. If Girls Against Boys was punk rock’s throbbing, double-bassed industrial disco gentleman, Brainiac was the genre’s wild-haired, benzo-popping mad scientist. (It’s no accident that GVSB’s Eli Janney produced Smack Bunny Baby and the band’s future releases too.) The band’s innate musicality is sometimes hard to pin down amidst the cacophony — whether it’s the clanging snarl of the title track indulging in wordless, sing-songy melodicism, the thudding dynamism of “Hurting Me” or the hip-shaking “Martian Dance Invasion” (which sounds like a lost B-52s single on Amphetamine Reptile), Brainiac consistently finds a way to pull crazily disparate threads together in surprising and satisfying ways. While their later albums would take a turn toward more experimental expressions (and would include guitarist John Schmersal, who joined after the post-Smack departure of Michelle Bodine), the essence of what made Brainiac so influential among artists ranging from Nine Inch Nails to the Mars Volta is on vibrant display here.
