But the hooks are relentlessly strong (see: “Judy French,” “Tell Me” or “The Stack” with its ascending chord pattern), Tony Esposito’s sneering vocals are hoarse and muscular in good measure (think Paul Westerberg with a bad head cold), and the riffs-well, they’re riffs. There are not a lot of surprises White Reaper mostly stays in its lane, risking redundancy on some lesser tracks (“Daisies”). Two of them (“The World’s Best American Band,” “Little Silver Cross”) even hurtle past the four-minute mark. The production is a bit clearer and less sludgy than on 2015’s White Reaper Does It Again, and the songs comprise the quartet’s most confident collection to date. On the album, White Reaper manages to distill all the strut and swagger of Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town” into one pithy, 10-song set. The song that emerges, which shares its cheeky title with the album, is sheer self-affirming cock-rock (“Rally up and dress to kill / Lace your boots and crush your pills”), a motivational speech for greasy-haired dirtbags. It is not a live album, and this sounds like a large audience packed into an amphitheatre, the sort of venue White Reaper might be headlining in a more excellent world. Maybe that is why The World’s Best American Band, the Kentucky group’s devilishly catchy second full-length, opens with the roar of an approving crowd. The band’s Wikipedia page claims they once played for 19 hours straight in Berlin, which is surely a joke, although it’s a testament to White Reaper’s live stamina that it seems believable. It’s rock for rock’s sake, outfitted with the gleefully immodest stage vocabulary of an ‘80s hair-metal band: kick-flips, dueling guitar solos-cocky gestures the average introverted indie band avoids like asbestos. The records are good, but onstage is where the band’s wonderfully scuzzy blend of pop-punk and garage rock goes stratospheric. The cliché “They’re better live” was invented for bands like White Reaper.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |