New Young Pony Club is a British Indie-Electro band that starting releasing records around 2004. Their exposure wasn't great, however, until uber-popular Australian record label Modular started releasing their singles. Ice Cream became a big hit, getting a lot of radio play on Australia's Triple J; Van She's Tech Remix of "Ice Cream" was in an episode of Entourage a few months back (just before Anthony Michael Hall peed off the hotel balcony) and the original version was in a commercial for LG's Chocolate phone.

I quite enjoyed their dribbling of hits, from "Get Lucky" (and "Get Dancey"), "The Get Go" and "Descend" (which was, oddly, not included on Fantastic Playroom.) On a personal note, "The Get Go" spent a significant amount of time at number 1 on my iTunes "Top 25 Most Played Song". But when I heard "The Bomb", the last single preceding the album, I became afraid that what I loved about their previous work had become absent.

I'm going to admit my bias right now: any new listener can certainly get down to the songs that I just mentioned. They're great songs and, despite a year of heavy rotation, I'm not sick of them yet.

My frustration with Fantastic Playroom is that the new songs fail to live up to the foundation of hype that the older singles had laid. Furthermore, and this is again only a gripe that someone who isn't listening to NYPC for the first time can make, only three of the ten songs are new. Consequently, the album falls back on the older singles.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. If you are a first time listener of NYPC, pick up this album. I guarantee that Tahita Bulmer's sexy voice and unique punk-ish staccato vocals will satisfy your taste, and the choppy guitar and soft synth interplay will mold together and make your mouth water. And the bass, ohhhhhh, the bass. The album will save you the trouble that I went through of hunting down the singles, as they're all here.

But if you're like me and you already have all of their singles released prior to the album, there's really nothing new here that's worth getting.

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"Ice Cream"