The Lolligags

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 - Flagpole July 2007

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. - Indie MP3

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.

- J-Sin

http://www.smother.net/reviews/items/modernrock/2198/The_Lolligags-Wired.php - Smother 2007

Southern music gets a bad rap. Even with the obvious diversity and culture that lives on every street in every red state, even after birthing bands and groups like OutKast, not too many people can fathom hearing music drifting from America’s bottom half that doesn’t sound like Limp Bizkit or Lynard Skynard.Which explains a collective, self-satisfied smile that spreads across the south whenever bands like Athens’ The Lolligags spring up from our ever-fertile soils.

The Lolligags are hopefully proud of themselves — each of the songs on their four-track EP bubbles over with bubblegum-chomping, new-wave beats, jittery keyboards and surreal, eyeball-fetish lyrics rounded out by singer Leslie Dallionís’ keen, cheeky Material Girl chirping.

On the opener, “Wired Up,” Dallion rips on The B-52s (See? The South has a great track record with this kind of stuff if you’d just get past the pile of CDs on your beefy cousin’s floor). You’ll get used to this voice, equal parts lustfully aroused and lovingly adorable. The randiness carries into “Kitten, Come Over,” which would be totally hot if only it didn’t sound like it was sung by your 13-year-old niece. Dallion wags a playful finger at the stalker she’s been stalking on “Creepy Things,” while beckoning a hopeful boy toy with the rather nursery rhyme-sounding “Suitcase Mystery.”

While the four tracks from the band are fun, sexual and refreshing, a full-length might get repetitive, if not seizure-inducing. But Wired proves to be an excellent start from a band just beginning to blossom.

http://www.performermag.com/sep.recordedreviews.0710.php
- PerformerMag October 2007

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.

http://www.rivetmagazine.org/2007/11/05/lolli-pop/

- Rivet Magazine Nov 2007

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 Lollygags 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, October 01, 2007 - Three Imaginary Girls Oct 2007

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 (order here for $5) 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.

http://cableandtweed.blogspot.com/2007/09/lolligags-wired-up.html
- Cable and Tweed September 2007