Third Eye

They’d already done hardcore and power pop, on Born Innocent and Neurotica respectively; where next for the McDonald brothers, the lynchpins and arch conceptualists of Redd Kross? Third Eye pointed in several directions — there was a strange twinge of hair metal here at times, which isn’t a surprise, given Redd Kross influenced some of those groups, but what comes through most clearly is a bubblegum glam ethos that reconciles the sugared pop confections of sixties bubblegum with the OTT, garish hues of the seventies — no wonder there’s a song called “Elephant Flares.” Somehow, the plastic-y sheen of nineties production does favours to Third Eye, giving it a hypercolour saturation that suits its pop smarts. And the biggest signal of all, “Bubblegum Factory,” could have fallen directly from a Kasenetz-Katz album.