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100 Under 60
The Hit & Mrs.
Independent release, 2006
http://www.thehitandmrs.com
REVIEW BY: Jason Warburg
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 11/17/2006
Those of us old enough to remember the days when the
Guinness Book Of World Records was an actual paperback volume rather than simply another corporate brand with a Web site can recall the unique pleasures of discovering the lengths to which some people will go in order to be noticed.
And truly, other than earning some sort of baseline recognition of your existence during your time here on earth, why else would you do something like hold eight live rattlesnakes in your mouth? These kinds of stunts don’t really lend themselves to high ideals like earning respect or making a difference.
So what, then, can one say about a band that not just cooks up but follows through on one of the most demented and potentially pointless exercises in extreme sports (musical division) that I’ve ever heard of? The Hit & Mrs. are Nelson Heise (vocals/guitar) and Robert Heise (bass/vocals) of The Heise Brothers and drummer Stacie Archer, and what they have achieved is as simple to explain as it is difficult to comprehend: a recording project consisting of 100 distinct and different songs, every single one of them under 60 seconds.
I didn’t call 100 Under 60 an album in the previous paragraph because it isn’t available in album form, existing currently only as a Web site from which each song streams. The entire collection is also expected to be available for download very soon via iTunes.
With such a high-concept project it would be easy to yak yak yak about the set-up and overlook the music itself. The Hit & Mrs. have a bit of the musical chameleon to them, of course, or they couldn’t possibly pull off 100 songs on one “album” without boring the listener to tears. Amazingly enough, they do pull it off, veering all over the stylistic road from their home base of occasionally thrashy, consistently disheveled and slightly snarky neo-classicist rock, a core identity that makes me think of a sort of post-modern, smartass version of the Troggs or the Kinks, or maybe if Pearl Jam traveled back in time and tried to make it as a late-60s British Invasion act.
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