Oy

First Box Then Walk (Creaked)

By Erin Lyndal Martin
Published: March 22nd, 2010 | 7:00am

On First Box Then Walk, Oy (aka Joy Frempong) channels everyone from Micachu to Peaches to Beck while remaining ferociously unique. The Micachu comparison is well-earned given Oy's seeming ability to make music using anything and everything; the album contains standard instrumentation but is augmented with accordions, native flutes, and toy instruments. Also like Micachu, Oy’s songs are usually short, most under three minutes. However, she deviates from Micachu both vocally, swapping styles often from dirty, Peaches-esque slam poetry to more melodic tones and from the grime-rock goddess image by featuring songs that, once begun, are fairly constant rather than peripatetic blitzkriegs.

It's hard to find a point of reference for Oy's lyrics. Always delivered with a straight face, her lyrics include toilet witches, trolls, laundry, and snakes under her bed. "Snake, snake / I gotta pee," she wails in the background of "Snake." These are all performed with the same affect (or lack thereof) as songs about things like sex ("Sex").

The most major pitfall of First Box Then Walk is the repetitive nature of the songs. While the album doesn't hurt for a wide array of styling, the songs themselves are often quite repetitive and leave the listener glad that they only last two minutes. The second pitfall of the album is its painful lack of editing. Though the songs are short, do we need 25 of them? Given the spastic nature of the album, a high quantity of songs would be hard to take in at any rate. But 25? Oy vey.

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