Pantyraid's New Album The Sauce Reviewed by Elizabeth Murphy

There’s no one word, sentence, emotion, or phrase that fully expresses how amazingly refreshing, and energetic PANTyRAID’s new album, The Sauce, is. You will be exposed to approximately fifteen minutes of entertaining beats, combined with a few unexpected samples that are out of this world.

This album, filled with its luring rhythms and catchy phrases, is one album that will keep your ears throbbing with excitement long after the album ends. For example, the track “Too Fine to do Time” starts off with a simple high-pitched, piercing sound that echoes in and out. It quickens slightly, and the high-pitched sounds screeches a little as if being remixed by a DJ on turntables before getting back to its origin al rhythm. A girl’s voice, soft and seductive sounding, whispers the song’s only lyrics, “I know I may be young, but I got feelings, too.” This is repeated throughout the duration of the song. At some parts, the girl’s voice breaks up in a shatter of glitching sounds as if she is being sucked into the Matrix. Her soft “Lolita-voice” is seducing, and mixes in well with the base as it slowly creeps into the song.

Although the lyric is but a mere sentence, the words are heavy and seem to give vivid images of a scenario based on that one line. While listening to this song, you can’t help but come up with a situation in your mind that fits the music. One can only visualize the scenario: A young girl sitting across from an older man, her hands cupping his, while her index finger gently outlines an imaginary circle in the middle of his palm. He throws back his head, regretting this newly developed fling, while she is reluctant to let go of it. And just when he’s about to say what has started was a mistake, that he has a wife and child, that she is under aged; and therefore illegal, she opens her mouth and says, “I know I may be young, but I got feelings, too.”

“Too fine to do time” is just one of the many tracks on this album that’s far beyond satisfactory. The album includes tracks like “Worship the Sun,” and “Beba” that are songs you simply must have in your CD changer. “Worship the Sun” is a seductive combination of drums, Hip Hop and a murmur of lyrics. It starts off with slow synthesizers which seem to vibrate out the speakers and into the air like the sounds of a violin. A male’s voice slowly speaks, the only part of the lyrics that are in English, “I worship the sun.” Immediately after this, the beatings of the drums begins, slow and seducing.

The hard beatings of the drum are played at the perfect tempo, and one can only imagine some seductive belly dance taking place: Hips swaying, and stopping in mid-air like knuckles meeting the bare wood of door to a house. The songs only downfall comes a little less than half way through the song when the beat switches up and leans more toward the hip hop side, instead of staying with the perfect balance it once carried in the beginning. The lack of a transition brings the listeners down a few notches from the rollercoaster of a high; we were creeping up toward the biggest hill in ride until the switch up rolled us backwards. It was almost as if two songs were merged into one. However, this wasn’t that great of a fault because many of the songs outweigh this slip-up.

After listening to a plethora of albums, with time, the listener begins to set standards of what is needed to make a successful album. And, so far, I have come up with this: a good album is one that produces good music, satisfactory lyrics, and an overall theme that connects all the songs together. This is not a good album, because it does more than that. A great album has this attribute, but also has the ability to stimulate the mind, while setting off sparks in the listener’s imagination. This album, by these standards, is great.


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