Mannequin Pussy is a punk band born in 2013 with a Sonic Youth kind of feel. They have so far released two albums and they can be listened in full in your work break, since the longest clocks at 18 minutes, and the shortest “Romantic”, is a mere minute quicker than its predecessor.

“Romantic”, then appears and disappears in a glimpse leaving very little to be said. The titular track is also the longest, lasting about 2:40 minutes, and everything else barely reaches two minutes in length.

The first track, “Kiss” is about everything you should expect from this, loud, aggressive, although not really abrasive, and, of course, fast. That isn’t to say that there isn’t some diversity here, “Emotional High” is an example of a slower paced track, that nonetheless only goes for a 1:27, time to go “Pledge”, a 1:20 minute shoegazy track. That was nice, next! “Denial”, a pop-rock track that almost reaches 2 minutes before the band decides to go back to fully fledged hardcore punk music.

“Romantic” feels much less like watching a movie and much more like quickly zapping through your TV occasionally stopping to see something that may have caught your interest but that you quickly change the channel. I honestly think that if you’re going to deliver an album as short as this, then you should deliver a solid experience, and this isn’t one. It tries to do different things, but it doesn’t want to give the time to fully expand on them on even let you absorb them. The album has a lot of good tracks, but this is a case of the sum of its parts being less than the whole.