Zip Zop Wow

Giant Princess

Zip Zop Wow

self-released

Giant Princess’s Zip Zop Wow, recorded in 2007 and 2008 but just pressed as an LP this past October by Indie Houston, is not an album with easy access. While mainly comprised of lo-fi power pop, the structure the band has built atop that base is some kind of weird folk architecture: colorful and imaginative, but abstruse, iconoclastic and directed toward a unknown purpose- as if the Orange Show were an indie rock band. 

In large part, this is because of Collin Hendrick’s vocals. Sunk deep into the mix, Hendrick half-yelps, half-wails in a fashion that seems to have little to do with the music; Honor Roll, for example, essentially devolves into a series of shrieks over blaring three-chord rock. Following that, on Lifetime Sexbrain, Hendrick squeezes out something that sounds like a strangled, abortive attempt at a melody over an awkwardly walking bass; on the chorus, he mumbles wheezily as the band pounds and pummels. Amid the cacophony, a lonely tambourine shakes three times.

In short, Giant Princess sounds as if they’re simply not playing very well. But then again, so do Shrimp Boat. So do Pere Ubu and Half Japanese. The closer one listens, the more apparent the meandering, ramshackle, borderline incoherent construction of the band’s music is a whole. Zip Zop Wow’s decoder key might be Oh Dalilah, which comes across, with a singsong guitar line and a nonsensical chorus (“Let me come inside your house, where you cook so good and nothing ever dies,”) like an utterly demented tribute to the Dimes’ 2006 release “Delilah.” Here, and throughout Zip Zop Wow, either Giant Princess is doing something conventional and getting everything wrong, or they’re screwing with things on purpose to create something familiar, yet quixotic and weird.

Giant Princess perform at Cactus Music on Saturday, December 11 at 1 PM.