Victorian Halls

The Chicago three-piece have an uncanny knack for constructing gleaming, crystalline, compact pop gems ... and then going after them with an axe like Jack Nicholson. They build the museum-worthy sculpture, and then dash it to the ground, manically laughing their heads off the whole time. It's the musical equivalent of a Pollock painting – a vibrant, technicolor, utterly uninhibited work devised by either a genius or a madman. It's hard to discern which, and it doesn't much matter anyway.