Wedged somewhere in the tight crevasse between Cracker and Better Than Ezra is a band called Nick Dastardly and the Escape Artists. And like their southern neighbors they write and perform jumpy, up tempo, catchy, hooky, and occasionally jam-friendly songs.
I realize that I've just described every band from every college town in Virginia. But hold on, Luther, I'm just getting started.
Nick Dastardly and the Escape Artists, to whom I will refer from here on out as `Rising Locals' for reasons not important to you, have released their first full-length creation, Let Go of My Bruised Wing.
The Rising Locals and their peppy, upbeat party album occupy a very crowded niche in popular music and can be compared favorably or unfavorably to any number of current radio kings such as Everclear, Matchbox 20, the Freewheelers, the Screaming Cheetah Wheelies, and so on and so on.
The band is your standard foursome:::::two guitars, bass, and drums with some other toys thrown in from time to time. Scott Miller, most-time vocalist, sings vague yet easily relatable lyrics in that bar-perfected one-cigarette-too-many kind of voice. Assuming you can get past all the musical hooks long enough to listen to any of the words. And Carlos Castro leans in with skilled, if often recycled, guitar chops and solos. For the record, the rhythm section is anchored by Dave Peers and Ira Miller.
There is not a bad song on Let Go of My Bruised Wing. And the band will probably quote that somewhere. That's fine. It is a good weekend album::::the kind of thing you would put on while warming up for a long Friday night before you get into your Chumbawumba/Summer `98 mix tape and then your heavier Led Zepplin/Jethro Tull mix you have left over from high school which scares away all the women and then eventually - late at night, on the couch, with the diehards and that kid in the funny, knitted clothes who never shows up before 1 am - Santana's Abraxas. It's good tapping, swaying music that can put you in a party kind of mode. And nobody except your downstairs neighbor can complain about that.
The band has employed the old tried and true method of album construction; put-your-strongest-radio-song-first-and-end-with::::if you can imagine this::::an-acoustic-y-slow-ballad. And in between the predictable bookends, the songs are so similar both to popular radio and to themselves that the album as a whole is less than the sum of the parts. Did I get that right? You know what I mean. Which may not be entirely unintended. The Rising Locals themselves describe the songs as "old-fashioned rock `n roll tunes." Nobody's trying to be Miles Davis here.
As for the live experience, I imagine these Rising Locals put on a pretty good show. Like I said, the songs are good, catchy, hooky, and you can step outside for a breather and come back and not feel like you have missed anything. This is the image I get in my head::::: there you are, in your baseball cap and leather braided belt, your fourth $5 bottle of Old Dominion clutched tightly to your chest, wrist out, swaying your hips just enough so that the woman with the sweater around her waist dancing in front of you rubs against you every couple of minutes or so. In between songs, the devoted followers (read: girlfriends) of the band stationed up front yell out requests and cheer in recognition at every opening chord. After each trip to the bar, you navigate your way back to the same spot behind the same dancing woman and eventually, during a quieter moment, you lean over, still clutching your bottle, and holler something stupid to her like "They're pretty good, huh?" And she'll tell you about the last time she saw them and you'll tell her it's your first time seeing them and ask "Which one is Nick?" and she'll introduce you to her friends and maybe you'll get a phone number and maybe you won't but each time the band comes around you'll go early and drag your friends and look for her and hope you can position yourself somewhere to pretend like you just bumped into her accidentally and one night you'll run into her friends and you'll have had enough Old Dominions to ask about her and they'll tell you that she is studying for her Orgo mid-term and you'll hope that they mention that you were asking and maybe she'll come out next time but the next time you see them they tell you she got engaged and transferred to Tulane. |