It takes The Battle Royale exactly seven tracks to slip out of their glow-in-the-dark electrotrash unitards: "Scream, Scream" at last grants their coy boy-girl vocals some breathing room, dusts off the harmonica and xylophone, and confirms what you'd only suspected till now: this Minneapolis quartet are just twee-pop charmers in clubby disguises. From then on, "Wake Up, Thunderbabe" is a twinkling, pretty acoustic affair—and a great one at that—hardly related to the persistent mechanized thud that came before. "Racecar" is situated on the faultline, falling away from sick guitar-delay pinball to a near-total emptiness with exactly zero warning.

But why the 180-degree A to B side reversal? It's hard to shake the feeling that Battle Royale have given us the "choose your own adventure" template for musical evolution: go ahead, pick a genre. It could be the band name has something to do with it—a yin and yang spurred into direct conflict. If that's the case, side B wins through passive resistance. Which isn't to say these guys don't wear their androgynous disco-bat costumes well at the outset, but the drum machine doesn't seem to get reprogrammed between cuts, blurring the distinctions between one glitterbomb and the next, and the fat synth sounds start skewing towards bloat. Sure, the dark coke-snuffing glam stuff can be fun, but you'll never lose track of the fact that indie kids, not some reclusive computer auter, are piloting this android, and probably have better things to do.