From Iceland — Elephant Poetry: Trash Can Honey

Published April 12, 2012

Elephant Poetry’s second album, ‘Trash Can Honey,’ is pretty much your bog-standard test card rock, complete with bullshit swagger, monochrome riffs with a whiff of psych, and chugga-wugga garage beats. Pretty boring, but not inherently offensive to the ears (“Ripped Velvet” is actually a decent track).
But for a bunch of Danish/Icelandic blokes, they have a really unhealthy obsession with good ol´ Yankee symbolism as they try to go for an edgy critique of US society (highway drives, CNN, Letterman shows, guns, deep-fried angels, etc. Even Superman appears on two songs). And just in case it gets too subtle, “He comes from America” is sung, just to ram home the point. Everyone’s walking on broken needles, that’s if they’re not in a photo booth with one in their arm (Pfft! Don’t they realise that meth and prescription meds are where it’s at these days?). And when they try to go anti-war on ‘Black Spoken Tongue,’ with lines like “My name is Mr. G.W.B/ and I´m just gonna borrow your son,” it’s frankly overripe and five years out of date.
‘Trash Can Honey’ isn’t the worst thing I’ve heard this week, but it’s nowhere near as clever or insightful as it thinks it is.
 http://www.gogoyoko.com/artist/elephantpoetry