Today’s Sounds

I challenge you to keep your cool listening to the hard guitars and deluxe crooning on “Don’t Get It,” the lead track on this latest record by Memphis rockers River City Tanlines. It’s not the heat, it’s not the humidity, it’s the vintage CBGB’s wall-sweat that’ll get you sticky.

Record:

River City Tanlines Coast to Coast (Big Legal Mess)

 

I challenge you to keep your cool listening to the hard guitars and deluxe crooning on “Don’t Get It,” the lead track on this latest record by Memphis rockers River City Tanlines. It’s not the heat, it’s not the humidity, it’s the vintage CBGB’s wall-sweat that’ll get you sticky.

Alicja Trout is the frontwoman here — she’s perhaps best known as the co-founder of the Lost Sounds, featuring the late Jay Reatard. These days, she’s not only involved in two other bands, she also finds time to run a record label. So it’s no shocker that it took this trio six years to release a sophomore album.

Memphis may not be the epicentre of rock ’n’ roll anymore, but there’s a purity here that fits in with the idea of that Tennessee town being the source. (I know that Elvis didn’t invent rock ’n’ roll, by the way — kudos to Craig Morrison for that.) It’s honest, unpretentious stuff, free of irony and fearlessly indulgent in girl group melodies, hoary riffage and totally timeless pop/punk/rock themes: crushes, rejection, boredom and being badass.

The muscular guitars on some songs suggest ‘90s alternative/punk production, but much of this record is hard to situate in time. If I’d heard it blind, I wouldn’t have thought it was current — I could’ve guessed ’70s, ’80s or ’90s, easily. There is nothing trendy about Coast to Coast, and there’s not much that’s novel. What makes it unique is the feeling that the band realized their dream hybrid, a late ’70s Frankenstein linking the era’s classic sounds of LA, NYC and England: Debbie Harry and Joan Jett cross-bred, with Steve Jones’s semen. Now that’s a heavy, heavy monster sound.

Listen to a stream over here.
 

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Video:

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