Pony Up! - Make Love to the Judges With Your Eyes

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Because I outgrew my infatuation with Baby Spice around third grade, I very rarely hear girls sing about their “boy problems”. I constantly hear the reverse. There seems to be a lack of strong female voices in the Indie Pop realm, and acclaimed indie female voices like Neko Case, Leslie Fiest, and Amy Millan… well they’re grown women. I don’t see them whining about boys not kissing them.

Girl bands have a tendency to feel gimmicky (The Donnas, The Like), but if the music is good there’s nothing wrong with a good audience draw. On Make Love to the Judges With Your Eyes, Pony Up! stumble around with a few impressive pop concoctions. Guitarist and part-time lead vocalist Sarah Moundroukas’ “The Truth About Cats And Dogs (Is That They Die)” is a charming cutesy pop song, and it is some of the most impressive Indie Pop I’ve heard all year—the melody won’t leave my head. Unfortunately, large portions of the album fail to give the listener the feeling given during “Cats and Dogs”, and a lot of the lackluster performances fall under the songs sung by Laura Wills"

"Possible Harm" drags on for what feels like forever and half way through it I can sense no end. It’s strange that a nondescript piano Indie Pop band writes a majority of their songs to flirt with the five minute mark—and even odder for a band whose gimmick is cute girls with cute voices. Wills’ songs are unimpressive slow builders instrumentally and melodically (see: “The First Waltz” and “Dance For Me”) which is disappointing because she’s arguably a better lyricist than Moundroukas

Still they’re a clever and artier bunch then they were on their debut EP. The band has moved on from juvenile sexual frustration humor to heartfelt sexual frustration melodrama. “Pastime Endeavor”, the most impressive track next to “Cats and Dogs”, is a rehashing of the feelings from famed EP track “Shut Up and Kiss Me” put more eloquently.

Pony Up! has matured with time together as a band and they’ve clearly come a long way (a lyrical except from the self titled EP: “My brother and sister are going to beat you up!”). The potential is there, and I’m not making any kind of predictions towards it being tapped. I’ll just say this: I am anticipating their sophomore effort.

- Marlon Frisby