Album Notes

The Monolators are a husband-and-wife rock duo from Los Angeles. Originally a trio, the band slimmed their ranks in the summer of 2005 to a twosome and, with the change in personnel, also migrated away from the garage-punk goofiness of their debut album, Rejection Set Me Free, to a more serious (but certainly not somber) tone for their second full-length release, Our Tears Have Wings. Rather than Peter Gunn-spy flick odes to spandex-clad hitmen, there’s instead cleaner pop-hook-driven bits of childhood memory shot through with longing and loneliness. Lead singer Eli Chartkoff wrote the songs mostly as an attempt to somehow combine the sweetness and yearning of his idol Buddy Holly with the cynical dance-pop of Jarvis Cocker’s Pulp; whether he succeeded is open to question, but the results are certainly interesting in of themselves.