CINEMA CINEMA is a New York City based band, dubbed "experi-metal punks" by The Village Voice. Formed in 2008, the band has had some solid album and touring experience, including 400+ shows across 10 countries, and an opening tour gig with the legendary BLACK FLAG. Their new EP "Mad Bites Dog" contains seven tracks. "Bomb Plot" features a fuzzily distorted guitar and trippy ambiance to go along with the shouted vocals. Fast, furious and heavy at times, it straddles the line of several genres but falls mostly in the Punk/Hardcore realm for me. "Run Until You're Out" has another direction altogether, with a spirited sound and something out of the annals of Indie music for sure. I can't help but thinking of it as a "fun" song. It just has a lot of that kind of energy. "Exotic Blood" is a much longer song that is all over the place. The saxophone? Sometimes when you listen to a band you get too much of their influences in their sound, or overproduction. That is clearly not the case here, you get 100% of their personality on this album, and it is completely uniquely theirs.

"Digital Clockwork Orange" is an instrumental jam with a free flowing approach, almost like it was being written as it was being played. The sax takes center stage here, flowing up and down scales and flying here and there. "Taxi Driver" is another loosely held together track, and if it isn't clear yet that there is nothing formulated about the EP, you will never get it. Sometimes I get a little DEAD KENNEDY's vibe, but only if the band dropped acid before recording. "Mask of the Red Death" is nearly half full of just anguished screams, until a guitar riff pokes out, sounding like something from a Dick Dale album. Guitar and bass play in unison, like a race involving two cars that are equally matched. "Shiner No. 5" is a nine-minute closing song that is as free and unbound as anything you have heard. The only constant on the EP is that there is no constant, save for possible the saxophone presence, heaviness and interpretive noise/dissonance.

Call it experimental, avant-garde, free association or whatever fits your fancy, but don't look for anything standard or familiar because it's few and far between here. In the end, the trouble with a review of an album in this style is that by its defined sound, it doesn't lend well to description or critique. So, in that vein, I invite you to check it out and decide for yourself.