Pitchfork

Between 2002's Are You Down? and 2003's Let's Get Serious EP, Brooklyn's Panthers really got their shit together. They softened up their heart-on-sleeve politico-art-rock shtick (or at the least drowned it in a miasma of guitar distortion), realized they were better mega-riffers than melody-makers, and most importantly, told drummer Jeff Salane that Panthers wasn't Orchid, the post-hardcore band he also drummed for. These minor adjustments alone made quite a winner out of Let's Get Serious, a record that openly exploited that tender garage-rock loophole that allows bands like this to succeed-- despite asinine lyrics, pisspoor melodies, the works-- simply because they rock so fucking hard. "Thank Me with Your Hands" alone rendered every other misstep they'd taken forgivable.

That EP got them off the Dim Mak label and onto the starry-eyed Vice roster, but as Things Are Strange suggests, Vice's vote of confidence may have tricked the band into overextending itself-- to do more than just rock. The album's track-to-length density-- 9 songs, 50 minutes-- is the clearest indicator of Panthers' aspirations beyond their MC5'd total energy stooginess. It's a mistake, though: During the half of Things Are Strange in which the band keeps the riffs aplenty, there's another half that Panthers spend deep in the asscrack of uninspired post-rock snooze.

Leadoff rockers "Legally Tender" and "Theory Is Famous" follow the band's anticipated trajectory: Guitar and basslines gel into one indistinguishable monolith, further compressing the drums and inning an out door for only the best of frontman Jayson Greene's horkheimered lyrics. "Give me a book and I'll read the shit out of it," will be everyone's favorite quote on Facebook.com any day now. Both songs reach way past the three-minute mark with no problem, a testament mostly to drummer Salane's appropriate and on-the-dime switch-ups. The fat but jerky unison breakdown midway through "Stroke My Genius" captures Panthers' live energy most vividly, the band then riding out the movement's distorted Brancan overtones into a killer snare-on-one stomp.

But 7-minute monsters demand more planning and better melodies for sustenance. All four of Things Are Strange's epic hopefuls-- from the death-by-napalm spaz-out that opens the otherwise limpid "We Are Louder", to the trick-or-treat, Murder She Wrote-esque ditty "If You Were Once Young, Rage", to the less pitiful but still predictable meandering of "Weird Birds"-- fail from destitute melodies lost in a haze of so-called art and supposedly introspective passages. "What's a riff" and "what's a melody"-- and even then, "what's a good melody"-- are inevitably personal distinctions, but regardless: the melodies (or whatever) Panthers subjected to their slow broods simply aren't engaging enough on their own to make up for the band's rock-out time-out.

Perhaps this is telling, but the two best tracks on Things Are Strange are re-recorded cuts from their previous releases. "Thank Me With Your Hands" wisely appears again here: Though a smaller aperture of production teases out more detail in the lead guitar line, Greene adds a whimsical falsetto to double the guitar at the end, and for the most part, Panthers play through the song transitions more confidently. "Walk of Shame", too, originally released on a late-2003 tongue-in-cheek split with fellow Brooklynites Japanther, plays host to the band's most virulent guitar hooks and the album's best preamble-- Panthers barely hold onto the song's reins, and the effect is just brutal and awesome. But there's a catch: The magic's over in two minutes, and for the next five, Panthers force a build that teases but never fully materializes. The track's lesson suits Things Are Strange as well: Panthers are best rocking us, not impressing us.