Explaining Brown Whörnet’s music is no picnic. Critics have tripped all over themselves trying to describe the Austin collective’s sound, one of which takes the cake: “Yes on a boombox whose batteries are dying.” But when a band effortlessly flips from a parody of cheesy hair metal to a Barry White-ish song about a gay man missing his partner, as it did on 2001’s radio ablum (sic) — and blends it together with radio intros, tiki lounge, random sound effects, classical music snippets and Gregorian chants — well, what can you say? The fact that the music has been harnessed into some kind of permeable structure is its true genius.
This article appears in Sep 4-10, 2003.