Acid Tongue - Babies

Based on their debut album, Babies, one thing could be said about Guy Keltner and Ian Cunningham, aka Acid Tongue - the guys certainly have an exquisite taste in The Sixties to Eighties psychedelic/garage/soul music. And if of you want anything close to a good start, using such a collection to your advantage is the best way to go. In brief, Acid Tongue does exactly that on this album.

First thing that you notice is that Guy and Ian know more or less everything there is to know about Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground (after all the guys are from Brooklyn). Add in a bit of the first two Modern Lovers albums from the Seventies when Jonathan Richman was still willing to plug his guitar into an amplifier, and a bit of Gordon Gano and Violent Femmes from their four Eighties albums. You also get a good dose of Sixties NY pop and particularly white soul in the form of Lovin’ Spoonful and particularly Young Rascals. Finally, there's Lenny Kaye’s original Nuggets compilation and bands like The Standells, The Seeds, Todd Rundgren’s The Nazz and others. Basically, the ingredients for a good mix are there, and the key question is - are Acid Tonge able to do anything with them?

Luckily for the duo, as well as anybody who chances to listen to this album, they are. Having a good taste in music, and Acid Tongue obviously does, doesn’t necessarily mean that you are able to produce anything meaningful out of them. But from the moment you pass the brief “Introduction” and delve into the actual tracks, starting with “Humpty Dumpty” you can easily recognize that Acid Tongue is able to come up with musical mixture/replicas for which The Strokes were proclaimed as being great. While the first few tracks serve as some kind of exploratory balloons, for example, “If I Really Loved Her” shows the duo’s penchant for Sixties white soul variations, it is really somewhere around the middle of the album and “Accidental Drug Use” that the guys really get into the groove and start coming up with some nicely balanced Velvets et al/soul/garage mix. “Something In The Water” is the perfect example of that balance which Acid Tongue is able to achieve here. Nice dual vocal harmonies are just an added bonus. In keeping with the tradition, and having the aforementioned “Accidental Drug Use” in mind, you can guess the main gist of the lyrics the guys come up with.

In essence, Acid Tongue keeps up with the standard of the music mix they aspire to on this album, up until the closer “Why Can’t You Just Lie To Me." It's at this point that we come to the ever-evolving question of originality. In this instance, asking it would be quite moot. Yes, you can easily detect the influences that guided the band in coming up with their music. But the thing is, they are good influences, they use them well, and in such a way that they are able to present an excellent springboard to add their own touch. And as far as most debut albums are concerned, that is more than enough.