Nobunny: Love Visions

The story of Nobunny is the story of a mysterious bunny-masked stranger from Tuscon, Arizona who began his strange career as an attempted Animal Elvis Impersonator. Touring the mock-Presley circuit as Elvis Bunny, and busking on the street as No-Money-Bunny on the side, Nobunny eventually made his way to Chicago, where he debuted his own material on stage the very day that Joey Ramone died (the set was dedicated to his memory). In his always unpredictable live sets, Nobunny has been known to pass the mask (and attendant duties) off to others on the occasion of losing his voice, strip down to his underwear (though the mask always stays on) and to schedule conflicting show dates staffed with Nobunny imposters. On one notable occasion, he was even assaulted and robbed while performing on the streets of Philadelphia.

Complete with a cleverly Ramones-mocking album cover and the “Land of a 1,000 Dances”-aping lead off track “Nobunny Loves You”, Nobunny’s barely-full-length debut (12 songs in just under 23 minutes) is a quick and dirty blast of lo-fi garage rock that would feel right at home on both a Nuggets compilation and a late-70s NYC punk club. Staffed with an array of pawn shop instruments — a ’60s-style organ on “Not That Good”, a cheapo drum machine on “I Am a Girlfriend” and “Tina Goes to Work” — and all performed in Nobunny’s authentically shouty and nasal vocals, Nobunny never strays far from garage’s bubblegum roots. The result is an album that is fun and catchy, but which leaves the lingering impression that Love Visions is still only a fraction of the Nobunny experience. As these songs are doomed to be upstaged by their creator in any context, they all but demand to be heard live amidst the chaos of a Nobunny performance, where the star of the show is not the songs but the masked man himself.