Angel & The Love Mongers reviewed
Angel & The Love Mongers
The Humanist Queen
(Rock Snob)
The last time a Tennessee-based band devoted an album to British influences, they were called Big Star and went down in history as the missing link. Don’t expect as much from Angel & The Love Mongers.
It’s amusing the Bible Belt could produce an act willing to do a cabaret cross-impersonation of Robert Smith and Morrissey; it’s unfortunate for them I’ve just begun a belated inquest into The Cure’s Faith and Seventeen Seconds. Frontman singer/guitarist Angel Zuniga, even without seeing a picture or video of him, obviously has flair. The Humanist Queen, for all it lacks, magnetizes itself to wherever the singer/guitarist goes even if those places have been visited many times before. On “Frankenstein’s Friend” he even tempers the schtick for a junkshop intro, opining “You cannot understand it/what it’s like to be me.” Too often the album behaves as if the only way to accompany such a voice is to revert to the ’80s, creating a domino-ing lack of imagination that makes you realize one thing: You should have gotten to those Cure albums earlier.
— Steve Forstneger
