Lesbians on Ecstasy

The Lesbians on Ecstasy concept is a sexy one: Take odds and ends from quintessential lesbian-with-a-capital-"L" music (you know, Melissa, the Indigos -- the stuff we like to sing at karaoke when we're all liquored up and our hipster-dyke defenses are down) and paste them haphazardly on top of ominous gay-boy club grooves and industrial/nu-metal squall. It's pastiche! It's postmodern! It ... doesn't sound very good. "Tell Me Does She Love the Bass," with its clod-footed bass and studiously bored vocals, is closer to Melissa Etheridge on lithium than Ecstasy. "The Pleasure Principal" is more of the same, this time with some attempts at Peaches-like bawdiness that are tediously lacking in nuance. A few of LOE's experiments work: "Kündstant Króving" creates a parallel universe in which k.d. lang grew up in communist East Berlin and developed a penchant for fingernails-on-a-chalkboard vocoder and circuit party breakbeats. No, really. It's kind of fun. The most successful song is "Summer Luv," an almost-pretty one-night-stand bastardization of a sort of R&B girl-group aesthetic that is, best of all, not married to a seductive but unwieldy and overly literal concept.