Pep*Squad

At least this band delivers on the promise of its name. From the opening track, "Battle of the Rabbits," you feel as though you've time-warped back to a fictional past when the club Tech Noir wished it could play music this frenetic. If Mr. Pacman fronted the Nails and ditched the horns, you'd get something like this: Fuzzy, relentless bass to match the strong if spare drumming and urgent yet equally minimal synth work behind barely clipped vocals make everything sound slightly tongue-in-cheek. Revisiting early-'80s new wave has rarely been this lively and curiously devoid of kitsch since the Faint put out Danse Macabre. If anything, Pep*Squad sounds as though it's trying to awaken the latent dance moves in its audience through sheer enthusiasm.
-Tom Murphy - Denver Westword

Two words sum up Pep*Squad’s newest release: Fun and Hilarious! You can’t help but nod along to this synth heavy 5 song dance party. They capture an 80s pop sound near perfectly. The vocals bring a British mod invasion that moves with inflections in just the right places and the backing vocals kick it up a notch. The lyrics are smart and very tongue in cheek. If you listen closely, you can’t help but laugh out loud when you realize what’s being said. Example? “She only spins Italian wax, she only smokes Djarum Blacks. She only pops prescription pills, she only listens to the Kills. She’s so cold.” Put that on top of some of the most original old school sounds to come out of Colorado in a long time and you’ve got yourself an album that is extremely ballsy and over the top in a good way.
-Greta Cornett - Colorado Music Buzz

When some bands meet for the first time they have only a loose idea of what they want to sound like. Listening to Pep*Squad, you get the feeling that they could have written their ideal sound out like a math equation: electro-clash + Flight of the Conchords as David Bowie = Pep*Squad. And all the songs will be written in British.

Singer/bassist Brett’s bitchy, vaguely effeminate, English-accented delivery is campy bordering on too much, but he does it with such panache that it’s hard not to like. And when you’re this eccentric you’ve got to back it up with hilarious and memorable lines, which he succeeds at often enough, as on the album opener “Battle of the Rabbits” when he croons and tweaks, “Even eagles have emotional scars.” His only serious misstep comes on “The Greater Good,” where his delivery of the word “good” sounds like the noise you’d imagine John Waters makes while experiencing climax, and it happens at least a dozen times.

Abby makes up the other half of the band, handling both keyboards and drums, and its easy to hear why the band performs live as a three piece, as her prominent synth lines make up the melody of every song and the drums are rich with high-hat heavy disco fever. I was glad to hear the band flirt with a little darker sound on the last couple tracks, still danceable, still up-beat, but demonstrating they’re capable of doing something other than discothèque rave-ups, which a full album’s worth of material would need. Kitschy dance fun.
-Nathan Harper - Scene Magazine