Reviews for the “Wired” EP

75 or Less The Lolligags sound almost exactly as you would expect them to sound by their name: a sweetly infectious blend of girlish vocals and keyboard keplunk-ery, surely a match made in electropop heaven. The first couple of tunes would not out of place at an indie-disco, but the duo shake things up with “Creep”, a track exploring the finer side of stalking, and employ an unexpected folk touch on final offering “Staircase Mystery”. Cute, but not on the wrong side of sickly, this EP is catchy, but just interesting enough to carry on holding your attention. – ellie

Athensexchange The Lolligags are an Athens band comprised of a man and a woman with clearly made up names, Dallion Lollihag and RG Lollifag. As soon as I heard Dallion’s vocals combined with RG’s talent on the synth I was dancing around, despite my freshly sprained ankle. Their music is contagious. Even at work, listening to The Lolligags turned the atmosphere carefree. The first song on the EP is the title track, “Wired Up.” Like most of the CD, it is very danceable. The beat is in sync with a heartbeat, which might explain why people like or dislike certain music. The music is keeping your body moving, but you aren’t so distracted by dancing that the words are lost. I think everyone has experienced what this song is about: someone who you want so badly that thinking about them keeps you awake at night. It reaches its climax when she says “I broke the coffee cup, the fucking coffee cup, threw it at you.” “Kitten, Come Over” is provocative. Its one of those songs where you get so enthralled by the music that you almost forget the song is about a quick hook up. The lyrics are so easy to learn, and the song is that much more enjoyable once you are able to sing along. The song “Creepy Things” is about spying. The vocals prove that it doesn’t matter what the subject; The Lollygags can make it into an innocent affair. You’ll have to listen to decide which song is your favorite. If you’re like me, you can’t get enough of their music, but there are two additional songs on their myspace. - Allison Carter

Cable & Tweed You know, I’m the first to claim outright that electro-pop is not my thing. Then I become obsessed with recent Of Montreal for months at a time and wonder whether I’m just a liar. Now another Athens band, The Lolligags, has forced me to revisit old assumptions. Their current EP on Happy Happy Birthday To Me is just four tracks long, but I find myself wanting to play it repeatedly. Particularly in my favor lately is lead track “Wired Up” — far too few songs have lyrics about obsession, insomnia, and throwing coffee mugs. Yes, please. - Rich Vining

Flagpole One song can be enough. When “Wired Up,” the first and for a long time the only track available by the Lolligags - Leslie Dallion Superstar of Pancake Meow and Ryan Breegle of Good Lord to the Devil - hit MySpace, there was a time when I couldn’t not be listening to it. Sure, pancakes do spring to mind quickly when thinking of Dallion, but “Wired Up” also had something else in common with the YouTube video for “Make a Pancake,” a simple, dizzy little song that dug into your brain WWI trench-style and fought you off whenever you tried to un-nest it. Now there are three more, all keyboard-focused, quick and tasting of a late-night sugar run to the convenience store. “Kitten, Come Over,” “Creepy Things” and “Staircase Mystery” all have their individual and collective charms, with the music layered in washes around Dallion’s marvelously piercing voice. The band sounds almost like Pylon as done by Bratz: full of hyperactive keyboards that jump around in a style that’s New Wave but not glassy, more Chuck Close than Richard Estes. No song quite matches the rush that was and is “Wired Up,” though, a song that, while almost a full three minutes long, begs one to hit repeat until one’s finger bleeds. I hesitate to designate any song the best single released in Athens in a year, but this one whooshed out of nowhere to make me want to eat sugar from the package with a spoon and climb up to the eagle atop City Hall to soundtrack all of downtown with this song. Four songs are great, but one song can be enough. - Hillary Brown

Indie-MP3.co.uk The Lolligags are an electro pop group from Athens, Georgia. Wired is their début EP and contains four tracks of what on the surface seems to pleasant, almost dancey, casio inspired electro pop. However scratch below that surface and you will find a sinister, sometimes funnily so, dark side to the band courtesy of their lyrics. The subject matter contains references to mental anguish, stalking and being terrorised. That’s just for starters and did I mention the sexual desperation of a girl in a lavender dress? It’s enough to make your hair stand on end. Maybe I am as sinister (sick?) as the Lolligags because I still have a smile on my face from listening their music. Forget your bubbly electro pop and take a trip full of mystery and suspense via this pretty fine EP.

Paste If you’re one of those types who’s terrified by anything remotely twee or indie pop, stay far, far away from the Lolligags. And the rest of you, who love fun and infectious melodies? Gather’ round and bask in the ridiculous catchiness of this Athens, GA., duo. Kitten, come on, let’s have a ball.

Smother Sugary melodies and catchy harmonies disarm you from the get-go on “Wired”, a quick EP of four songs. Only but a duo, the Lolligags has a complex and richly textured sound of dance punk, indie pop, and electro are stirred into one sweet ass sound. Female vocals give it a shine and sexiness that other groups in the same genre don’t manage. Nice.

Songs:Illinoise This disco-vintage sounding Athens based indie pop duo should be from Sweden. I should be writing about them on Swedesplease. But somehow, impossibly, this duo is from the deep South of all places. Their debut ep, Wired, is out now on Happy Happy Birthday To Me Records, but why don’t you pick it up from lead singer Dallion Lollihag’s “scented dessert charms” (and buttons) website - Pancake Meow (here for $5). If you’re still up tonight then “Wired Up” is the perfect insomniac’s musical companion piece. And if you, like me, just finished watching Zodiac (or any other terrifying true crime film/novella) then “Creepy Things” off their MySpace page is the next best thing.

Three Imaginary Girls With keen pop sensibilities, playful harmonies, and lo-fi dance beats, the first impression the Lolligags left on me was, “isn’t this cute?” It was adorable, like watching a child say his first word. After paying closer attention to the words I began to think it was adorable, like watching a child say his first word – if that word was “fuck”. The Lolligags are an electronic duo (names: Dallion Lollihag and RG Lollifag) that takes pop music and turns it on its head by dealing with topics outside the norm from most contemporary music. Revenge, stalking, and unbridled lust are all themes that come up on this short but whip-smart four song EP. Imagine, if you will, the Dresden Dolls meets the Go-Go’s. If you’ve ever read a fairy tale and thought, “that’s just creepy” (and frankly, who hasn’t?), the Lolligags may very well be your new favorite band. “Staircase Mystery” has a childish sound to it – and it is about children, and how they adapt to being in a creepy mansion without any supervision. “It’s alright and it’s okay, here we are and we must play; The staircase mystery; No cookies, no cones, no licorice red, the nanny’s dead; we’re beginning to feel that we’re not alone,” Dallion sings over the synth lines. It has all the tension of a Hitchcock film confined to a three-minute song. In the first track, “Wired Up,” Dallion wants to settle a score with an old lover, presumably, but never explains what it is she wants to do, or how she’s going to go about it. She is vague on details. All we know is this unnamed person did something horrible to her and it kept her up all night. She wants to become a person like him so that she can put that same person through the same, or similar, torment that gave her insomnia. The song works because that absence of detail. With the best pop music, we can empathize with it and apply it to situations within our own lives. Wired is a brief album – it clocks out just past the 12 minute mark – but it’s the perfect length. If the album went any longer, the songs would need to differ more aurally than the one before it for the album to work as well as it does. The songs are simple in the sense that they are verse/chorus/verse and not buried under layers and layers of production but are complex in that they also explore deep psychological issues. The Lolligags gleefully enter the macabre. Like a good EP, it leaves its listeners curious for a full-length but will hold us over in the meantime. It’ll have to. – ChrisB

Rivet Magazine  Halloween may be just a memory, but until Thanksgiving comes, it’s still the season for tricky treats. The Lolligags are like Hansel and Gretel, uncovering the sinister crunch of candy-sweet electropop.  Split by geography, the duo—Dallion Lollihag, aka Leslie, in Athens, Ga. and RG Lollifag, aka Ryan, in Nashville—composes music over the telephone. But lack of technology (synth man Ryan does not own a computer!) hasn’t hampered them, and a four-song EP, Wired, is out now on Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records.  Leslie’s new wave voice doesn’t completely belie the naughty content within: She sings “Creepy Things” from the perspective of a stalker’s stalker; “Staircase Mystery” tells a twisted fairy tale and “Kitten, Come Over” is a pouty invitation to sex. The band just played its first show ever last Friday and has two more November dates scheduled in Athens. Go check them out, but for safety’s sake, be sure to leave a trail of bread crumbs.  Andrea Benvenuto

INTERVIEWS

Flagpole August 29th, 2007 by Gordon Lamb Even though the group has yet to play a single live show, Nashville/Athens band The Lolligags has caught the attention of many Athenians full on. Working with a New Wave sound that is quickly becoming more modern, the band remains, in many ways, as home-spun and charming as they come. Members Leslie Dallion and Ryan Breegle met while attending college in Florida several years ago. A long friendship and shared musical tastes resulted in the pair deciding to begin making music together. By this time, though, Breegle was living in Nashville and Dallion in Athens. Employing truly archaic means of musical communication - land-line telephones! - the pair managed to write a healthy batch of songs, the first of which are available on the recently released EP Wired, out now on Athens label Happy Happy Birthday To Me Records. The Lolligags seems to be simultaneously reaching back and pushing forward. Although her vocal style is incredibly reminiscent of Siouxsie Sioux, Dallion’s lyrics are much more straightforward. Similarly, the tunes composed by Breegle at first listen present themselves as minimal New Wave tunes, but subsequent listening reveals deeper layers in terms of both melody and rhythm. There’s also a certain shock when one realizes that these songs are, despite the band’s sweet-sounding name and accessible tunesmithing, tales of domestic squabble, sexual frustration, malaise, loathing and all-around adult-oriented themes. Flagpole spoke with Dallion and Breegle when they were both in town recording some new tracks over at Jason NeSmith’s Bel*Air Studio.

Flagpole: So what’s up with this name The Lolligags?

Leslie Dallion: I dunno. We were in Jason NeSmith’s kitchen and I was, like, “Hey, we’re the Lolligags!” It also sounds like lollipop, and I do a lot of work with my company Pancake Meow and am always thinking about candy. So there.

Ryan Breegle: There’s a lot of potential imagery in the name.

Flagpole: Do each of you write the music or is it one person doing the lyrics and another doing the music?

Ryan Breegle: We each write music. Leslie comes up with a melody and she’ll sing it over the phone and I put something down and we go back and forth. It’s all over the telephone. We don’t share audio files.

Leslie Dallion: Sometimes I’ll play something I’ve come up with on my laptop and Ryan holds a tape recorder to the phone. Seriously! A lot is lost in the process, but we still think it sounds good.

Flagpole: When you guys finally do get out and play live, will you have a live band or will most of the music be prerecorded?

Ryan Breegle: We thought about both options, but think we’re gonna go with largely prerecorded stuff.

Leslie Dallion: The stage is going to be filled with all kinds of props, so there’s no room for a band!

Ryan Breegle: It’ll give us more control over the music… I’ll play guitar and some keyboards.

Leslie Dallion: I’ll just be singing.

Flagpole: You have at least 28 songs recorded already. Why is the debut EP only four tracks?

Leslie Dallion: It’s just supposed to be an introduction to the band. We just did it for fun. To put it out there. We probably have more than half of the first album in the can from all those songs we recorded.

Ryan Breegle: Leslie always likes the most recent stuff the best.

Flagpole: Why the hell has it taken so long for you guys to plan and play a show?

Leslie Dallion: We just wanted the first gig to be special. We didn’t wanna go and just do any old motherfuckin’ bullshit.

Ryan Breegle: After the first gig, though, as long as we’re together in the same place we’ll be able to play. Especially with if we go with mostly prerecorded tracks.