Fast

(BMG)

Custom makes it debut on the big music scene with its album Fast, featuring a parental advisory sticker. The group is well-schooled in traditional rock - with guitar, bass, drums and screaming vocals dominating the tracks. However, this sound is pushed to a more playful and elastic edge with the inclusion of cellos, other strings, programming and gospel singing on various songs. Custom, the lead artist's name as well as the band name, has a nice, throaty voice appropriate for a crooning rock god.

The transition from sensitively handled guitar riffs and Custom's cooing voice to heavy vocals and bass - often in the middle of songs - is jarring and grating. Yet, mellow songs, like "Beat Me" and "Mess," send waves of grooving music to caress the brain, hinting at the musicianship hiding behind Custom's otherwise heavy-handed sound.

Lyrics are the weak point of the album. I suggest that Custom enroll in an introduction to poetry class. Most lyrics are either immature locker-room mouthing-off, or rambling, rhyming rants such as, "infallible bombastic/sonically elastic/energetic spastic/explosive plastic/sculpture-cast it."

Custom is particularly infatuated with where his penis has been. In the song "Daddy," he sings, "I'm all up in this girl whose husband is a cop." "Hey Mister" is not much better: "God gave her the perfect body/now I'm all up in it." Congratulations. Fortunately, Custom also cautions the listener that "there's no piece of ass worth a friendship/a friend doesn't let a friend bang another friend's girlfriend."

The song "One Day" is appropriately prophetic for Custom, who sings, "One day I'll be grown up." Custom's audience can anticipate the evolution of sound that will follow when Custom grows up just a little bit more.