Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

I don’t know quite what to tell you about this. I don’t know whether you will like it or not because I don’t know whether I like it or not. Some of it hits me as great on some days and lousy on others. I have a hard time getting a consistent grip on any of it. Whatever it is, it’s really well done; it’s just that “it” is not necessary wonderful. But it doesn’t necessarily suck, either.

Anyway, The Spoken X is a duo consisting of Peter Parker (yes!) and Ted Golder. Parker lays down rock instrumental tracks while Golder raps, chants, and tells stories. Or not. “Akoustik Attack” consists of Golder chanting, yep, “Akoustik Attack” over Golder’s catchy guitar riff. “Get Out of My Face” is somewhat similar, though it’s more like the dialogue from the end of a relationship of some sort --- could be familial, intimate, or just a street hassle. It’s not rap, and it’s not really poetry. It’s more like a spoken word album set to rock music. There are a couple of tracks that are semi-irresistible. “Superstitions” has an Angus Young-type guitar riff humming away nicely over Golder’s kind-of-creepy narration, and “Wild Child” is an aural snapshot of a street hassle. And “Breaking All The Rules” sounds like it could easily be the loud and proud entrance theme for one of those WWE characters, with a bit of tinkering. “The Party Song,” however, comes off as somewhat pretentious. Yet most of WILD CHILD lies somewhere in between, in Jim Morrison’s “Celebration of the Lizard” territory, where the landscape keeps shifting between the cool and the pretentious.

I’m going to basically give The Spoken X the benefit of the doubt on this one. There is nothing on WILD CHILD that will make you run shrieking out of the room --- you can’t make that claim with a Crash Test Dummies CD --- and in an age where 90 percent of everything is either derivative, unlistenable, or lowest common denominator crap, The Spoken X should cred for trying.