Bi-polar disorder is a bitch. Its latest victim is new band Higamos Hogamos and their self-titled effort. Which leads me to my point: this is an odd album. Yet the band is equally odd, so maybe it’s intentional. The 35-minute journey alternates between jittery, dreamy dance-rock and spacey instrumentals. Aside from two back-to-back tracks, Higamos keeps to this exact pattern too: dance rock, instrumental, dance rock, instrumental, etc. This is the main fault of the record. For the first few tracks, it’s a bit jarring ”“ in a good way; you never know what you’ll hear next. But upon repeated spins, this configuration becomes an annoyance. There isn’t a good reason to warrant such an arrangement, and such a strict one at that. The problem then becomes a question: why? And that’s never a good question to ask when it comes to music. The album contains no cohesion because the album (and, in reality, the band itself) can’t choose what it wants to be or what direction to go. It’s frustrating more than anything else because these guys have some serious talent. Both the songs with and without lyrics have sticky melodies that will remain in your head for days, and that’s a good thing to have. It’s a shame, then, that said melodies are damn near completely wasted on this (failed) endeavor of an album.Of the two sets of songs, the trippy instrumentals are the better half of this bizarre experiment, mainly because they don’t have meaningless lyrics. That is not to say that the other half is bad; they’re just not irritating. Some songs consist solely of the chorus or a single sentence repeated ad nauseam. ‘Little Switch’ for example, has more lyrics than just “Got a little switch inside my head,” but that line is the only one that 1.) makes any amount of sense (go figure), and 2.) is intelligible. ‘Moto Neurono’ best exemplifies the fact that Higamos should stick to instrumentals. Over its seven minutes, the song goes from funkified Pink Floyd to Holy Fuck to late period Blur to early Brian Eno. Just incredible.Edited properly, this would’ve made a fucking great EP. 67%Higamos Hogamos on Myspace