Utilizing a guitar and a synthesizer to produce their sound, and a drum machine to lay down the beats, Sharon Schloss and Jonn Walterscheid make up Portland, Ore.’s Bumtech.

The band’s debut album’s sound is a mix between surf-rock and rockabilly guitar, with a lot of techno thrown in. Bumtech has an even mix of the vocals of Walterscheid’s monotone voice and Schloss’ beautiful voice.

The lyrics on most of the songs are a little hard to understand. This is not because they are in a different language or too distorted, or even because the meanings are too deep. The lyrics are hard to understand simply because they are just plain odd.

Take the track “Scrotess, Weanis, in the Work Place.” Exactly what is a Scrotess or a Weanis? This is something that is left to the listener’s imagination, but is it something worth pondering for too long?

Also, anyone wishing to know the process for making jam and what to do with the jam should listen to the track “Mama Schloss’ Fruit Jam”, which lists possible fruits to be made into jam, and also informs us that jam is good on a bagel with cream cheese, as well as on toast with peanut butter.

The album is filled with lyrics about your every day boring things like jam and the things in the trunk of a car, but if you listen close enough the lyrics have a deeper meaning. Bumtech is talented when it comes to writing semi-deep lyrics, but when it comes to musical talent, there is definitely something missing.

Sometimes it feels like listening to a junior high school’s “Battle of the Bands” competition, because Bumtech’s musical range is not very vast. They have found a few chords and synthesizer sound effects that they enjoy, and seem to stick within the cozy confines of them, only sometimes branching out into the world of more complex chord progressions and guitar solos.

Something that would have made this album better is if Schloss was the only one to sing the main vocals on this CD, with Walterscheid occasionally singing back up. Walterscheid’s voice is quite monotonous and is not very pleasing to the ears at all because it possesses a nerdy quality, and not in a good way.

Schloss’ voice, on the other hand, is quite melodic and sounds similar to Shirley Manson of the band Garbage. If she had sung about the mundane every day things for every song on this album, she would have made boring sound beautiful instead of weird. To be a band with just two members, it takes a good deal of talent to produce a really great music and not sound ridiculous. Most of the time, Walterscheid and Schloss have what it takes to be really great, but the other half of the time, they just sound silly.

Stephanie Dumm can be reached at [email protected]