Rock songs and ballads built around humorus lyrics pertaining to male/female relationships. Insightful, funny stuff.

13 MP3 Songs
ROCK: Folk Rock, POP: California Pop



Details:
VBROS GREATESTITS
By Charles E. Bogle

Who are The VBros?

The mystery remainsâbut there is no mystery about this "breast of" package: it is indispensable, whether you are a bonafiade mysogynist or merely a dabbler. These enigmatic "brothers," who reportedly record in a converted outhouse deep in the Pacific Northwest, deftly tread a line between parody and sincerity. There is art in this music, somewhere. I think.

Songs like "Back to Stay" and the reggae send-up, "Believe it," recall the deliberately insipid love song lampoons of the late Frank Zappaâbut are more purely poppish in feel than Zappa's relentless bite would have ever allowed. But The VBros have range. "Cowboy Cosmology" takes a poke at "good old boys" from the "heartland" who never quite make it at, well, anything, decade after decade. (You get the feeling that, as a "straight" song, this one might acquire a Dylanesque, or even Traveling Wilburys punch.) Then there is "Richard Suckingood,"which skewers Appalachian folk music, but with a hard edge. Think Beverly Hillbillies theme meets Larry Flynt.

Although the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Organization for Women (NOW), Gloria Steinem, and Oprah have denounced The VBros as "a singing hate-crime," the Brothers' work has also been hailed for treating rejection, sex, and male-female relationships with "refreshing absurdity," to quote the New York Times. And the denunciations from femmes have not been universal. Yoko Ono, for instance, has allowed that "Sensitive Man," the story of a male transformed by surrendering more to his feminine side (notably by leaving the toilet seat down), is "showing us wisdom in its humor." (Ono, incidentally, refused to comment on reports that she urinates while standing up.)

The brothers âV" (which has been rumored to stand for everything from "Verisimillitude" to "Virginia") are no strangers to genuine love songs either. NOW apparently missed the album's downright glorious and loving salute to the ladies, "Women Like You." This is the VBro's answer to George Harrison's "Something." Sample lyric: "I'd cry me a river of big brown tears and drink it with a bucket of spew/ Blow chunks in a barrel and do it again/ Just to have a woman like you."

Then there is "The Letter," which endorses the kind of plain talk that women crave, but often complain about never receiving, from "repressed" men. "Inside that letter, I wrote the things/ Your heart has been longing to hear/ Things that a man finds so hard to say/ About love, his hopes and his fears." Lest fans think this is yet another concession to the sensibilities of Ono, the tune ends with a playful twist: "But as I walked to the mailbox/ I rolled it real tight/ and stuck it up my ass instead." Small wonder that men's groups across the country are beating drums to "The Letter."

This review would be remiss if it did not point out the lengthy synthesizer-driven piece,"I Wish I Wereâ¦Enya," an exercise in pure composition and musicality that is eloquent and moving. Evidence that the "V" in "VBros" also stands for "adventure." One suspects that these women-spurned north woods mystery men have more potential than they're letting on. What's next: "Sgt. Pecker?"