One of you brilliant bloggers in here suggested I add Sneaker Pimps to our music list. Among those around me I’m known as the girl who knows a lot about music but can’t remember a band name if her life depended on it. It’s true, too. It’ll take me ages before I can place a song to a band because I simply can’t remember the band’s name.

So when someone suggested the Sneaker Pimps, the name sounded vaguely familiar and I looked them up on Rhapsody and heard “6 Underground” off of their Becoming X album... it was literally one of those “Oh yeah! I know that song!” moments. Needless to say, from what I remember about the Sneaker Pimps is thinking that they had an odd resemblance to Luscious Jackson, a group that while they created some cool songs, didn’t seem to have the creativity to branch away from those catchy tunes. Well, I’m happy to announce that the Sneaker Pimps surely do have that diversity and they do not create albums of one-hit-wonders.

I suppose you can say they’re somewhere between Portishead and Luscious Jackson, but like any good band, the Sneaker Pimps suddenly go somewhere else completely. It’s a lazy album, with moody beats and airy vocals. Kelli Dayton’s voice is eerily similar to Kristen Hersh but also more versatile. The vocals in “Tesko Suicide” sound a little like that of Mary Timony’s of Helium, but the more melodic vocal parts of that song add to the odd beats. Songs like “Becoming X” and “Spin Spin Sugar” are clearly trip-hop, but make your way to track number 6 and you’ve found “Post-Modern Sleaze”; with acoustic guitars leading the musical melody and Dayton’s vocals also following the melodic theme, it’s clearly a rock song.

Adding more rock to the trip-hop genre is one thing that the Sneaker Pimps succeed in doing in this album, especially in songs like “Low Place Like Home”, “Water Baby” and “Roll On”. The songs start off sounding like something right off of Portishead’s Dummy but morph into a more live sound with drums and guitars in overdrive, giving the songs more density and simply make them more interesting to listen to.  One definite highlight of the album is the beautiful “How Do” – Dayton’s vocals create the main melody of the song as the music drifts over a slightly quicker beat. Oh, and you can never go wrong with “6 Underground”.

Becoming X is definitely a great album and is now on my list of must-haves. Check it out!