Spin.com
If the intro riff to Jyoti Mishra’s “Bunny Boiler” is anything significant to go by, you can expect sunny California hardbodies in flourescent tho-tho-tho-thong-thongs (Sisqo is really Porky Pig with a nifty silver hairdo and a flashy disguise) to come popping out of a Newport Lights-painted poolhouse. For a more
surfer-friendly, suspiciously Friends theme song-on-speed-like track there has never been. Well, not recently anyway.
Still, that Friends-esque comparison doesn’t entirely hold weight in that all the soft and fluffy aspirations of the theme song are regarded rather viciously here with the lyrical equivalent of…oh, say, an industrial-strength blowtorch. First off, you won’t find Ross giving Rachel a teddy (neither the lacy, silk nor the stuffed kind); the title of the superficially-cheery track gives that much away, I figure. Although White Town could also just have a hidden fetish for torturing Hugh Hefner’s playmates. While that’s another story for the rumor-hungry Spin.com news mill, I can tell you that the “Your Woman” man of yore has more than a little bit of a poison pen to share with the lot of those who will listen.
Packed into a hardcore-worthy one minute, “Bunny Boiler” is, at the least, a millennial take on “Hold on to Your Friends,” written by the star of the Mope Show, Morrissey. And the fact that Mishra and White Town, along with various others, are the ones bringing the act of wearing your wit and emotion on your nappy, musician sleeve in the computer age is especially appropriate considering that one of the places Mishra seems particularly omnipresent is the internet; his opinions can be found on a number of music-related newsgroups and on his self-maintained webpages (http://www.bzangy.com). And opinionated he is, if the bunny being boiled in this track from White Town’s latest is a clue. Boy, would I hate to be in that pot of wabbit stew…but listening to the frothy, surprisingly straight rock-ridden composition is enjoyable for even the subconsciously sadistic and/or masochistic.
