Search - Tiki Tones :: Leisure Experiment

Another boozy one from the tiki tones

06/13/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Here's another boozy,loungy, beachy, spacey one from the Tiki Tones. Just like their classic, Suburban Savage, The Leisure Experiment provides a soundtrack to your life. It is the perefsct moodmaker for drinking or driving, or both. Of course I don't mean that. I know, it's short, an EP. but in this case, it's worth it. Buy it."

Born-Again Bachelor Pad Musicians

Henry R. Kujawa | "The Forbidden Zone" (Camden, NJ) | 07/26/2004

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I read so much about this over the last couple years, I knew what I was in for. Nice, but but thrilling. See, they started out with a guy named Josh Agle (SHAG) as lead guitarist. SHAG got so successful doing paintings, he had to quit music. In a truly bizarre twist for the bar band scene, The Tiki Tones, rather than have the dignity of going belly-up (as Josh's other band, The Huntington Cads, did), mutated.



Seems someone-- I don't understand all the details-- HIRED new musicians to carry on the band's name. Then they completely changed their sound. Out went south-sea island stuff (no more OOGA-chaka-chaka-OOGA-chaka-chaka). Instead, they went for 60's futuristic bachelor pad music stuff. This puts them, more of less, in the same area as Stereophonic Space Sound Unlimited, as well as certain recordings by Finland's The Cybermen and The Hypnomen. However, while those 2 are real bands, and S.S.S.U. is a pair of genius studio producers (2 people doing all that sound!), these guys in CA have 5 people in their band, plus 10 more listed as additional musicians. And somehow, so typical of the California music scene (the big-business end of it, anyway), ALL those people, and it doesn't sound half as good as what Ernest Maechi & Karen Diblitz do all on their own in Zurich, Switzerland (S.S.S.U.). Nice-- just not, WOW!!!!!



And, there's only 6 songs on this thing, clocking in at barely over 15 minutes. Best track is probably Green Bananas, which I downloaded off the internet 2 years ago. They also do a cover of Music To Watch Girls By, but's it's nowhere near as good as the original by The Bob Crewe Generation (which I've been listening to a lot lately, by some odd coincidence).



And meanwhile... what continues to be infuriating is The Tiki Tones' 1st CD, IDOL PLEASURES, is out-of-print, and the thing has so far refused to turn up anywhere for a reasonable price. Every time it shows up at the GEMM site, some fool's selling one for like $30 or so. Could this have anything to do with the noteriety of SHAG, I wonder? (His one contribution to the 2000 disc, by the way, was "design".)"

Not bad if you stumble across it for less than 10 bucks

Danno | NY, NY | 09/03/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Does anyone remember the late 1990s retro-exotica boom besides me? I legally downloaded the Tiki Tones CD when I bought a CD burner back then and recently rediscovered these songs.



This isn't bad music - it's similar in spirit to what Combustible Edison did much better. "Green Bananas" is the best thing here, featuring a sinister fuzz guitar riff, dialogue samples that seem to have been taken from an old B-movie, and some odd operatic tenor popping up unexpectedly. It's a great go-go/novelty song, the type of thing we might expect from Los Straitjackets.



While the Tiki Tones might have been a real band, most of this CD sounds more like sessionmen who aren't exactly killing themselves to win us over. Maybe this was the point of the CD? I really don't know. It's a pleasant enough listen but if you like the genre, go for Combustible Edison, Stereolab, or the Sneaker Pimps."