Score: 2/10
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Pedro the Lion has a song about getting your first bike when you’re six years old. And you know what? They sound like it. They sound like a band that would sing about getting your first bike when you’re six years old.
So boring it should come with a government stipend rewarding a complete listen (a predicament I wouldn’t know firsthand, for the record), “Yellow Bike” pedals in with the same impish, pedestrian rock Strokes/Arctic Monkeys blueprint that would make the Fleet Foxes sound futuristic, that sets antiquated indie rock back even further to that leather “cool” rock revival of the early ’00s. The problem is that these guys are a far cry from “cool” (anybody with a voice this band should sing about how he fornicates with animals, or maybe stays up all night watching The Office reruns, so that at least laughing at him would be fun), these songs have zero flair, zero polymorphousness, zero unorthodox instrumentation, and for Christ’s sake somewhere Jet is looking for a tour opener and they just might get it.
Well, the introduction of this album slightly enjoyable, I suppose, hence allowing them to sidestep the “zero” rating, one feather in its cap being that, uh, it’s SHORT, a minute-and-change etude of velvety synth that might call to mind Pavement’s goof-off track “Colorado” (then the next song does offer lyrical imagery of the desert, appropriately enough). Anyway, I dunno what’s worse: that somebody told this band they were good, or that somebody told them it was the year 2002.