Remember Ready, Set?Do--That brilliant charismatic Doers record that you could find buried alongside a bunch of art supplies and wrangler cut-offs on every very East Van kid?s bedroom floor? I remember it too, and fondly at that. Well, after a year and some Team Doers reorganization, the band has delivered their number two. Whatcha Doin? is a splendid addition to the Doers catalougue--a hyperactive, cheeky, ultra-enthusiastic joint in classic Doers form.

Despite sporting enough songs (19) for a double album Whatcha Doin? doesn?t take long to get through. Songs like Keep Yr Shirt On, Gimme That, We Want It Back or Just Sayin play out in such a blur of frenetic bass and tongue-in-cheek racket that your perception of time gets all fucked. Naturally, the bulk of the tracks barely clear the two minute mark; I don?t know whether this is a nod to the early acoustic-punk outfits the Doers follow or if their attention spans are just so feverishly short they can?t bear staying with one melody past 1:49. Always a band willing to self-mock, the Doers acknowledge their predilection for brevity: ?Just like a Doers song/He won?t be staying long? (Everyman).

Despite a tendency to be busy, this album is rarely erratic. Through the deluge of messy instrumentation and manic spoken word exclamations there arises an unmistakable sense of coherence, and it?s more present here than on any of the previous Doers albums. Subdued songs like ?Hello Horsey? or ?Handjob at Sunset? (HA!) serve as nice time-out accents to the franticly mischievious child that exists somewhere in the core of this quartet.

Though I still hear the Violent Femmes, Minutemen, and bands like Mission of Burma in these tracks I smile at the thought that the teahouse jazz/power-pop/punk aesthetic of the aforementioned bands has been laying mostly dormant since the mid-late eighties (I?m excluding later Violent Femmes as it is pap). No one really bothered experimenting with that sound past the 80s and it kind of tapered off into obscurity. In Whatcha Doin? the Doers get ahold of it, shake it vigorously, dress it up in summery fun, teach it to cuss and set it loose on the world to get shit done. I?d say making the college radio top ten for the month of may is a fairly concrete testament to The Doers success in reinventing their genre. Get money, buy this album and have a bbq.