Bootleggers and Baptists – Take Me Home
Genre: Southern Rock / Red Dirt, Garage Rock, Alternative Rock
When you’re about to tell someone something that is about to really shake them up, you let them know that they’re about to be surprised. You don’t start out by letting them know that they’re about to hear something that they’ve heard many times before. Yet, the great garage rock bands, like Bootleggers and Baptists, do this exactly.
There’s almost no chance that you are not familiar with the kinds of sounds from which garage-rock groups draw. These bands like the blues, and you almost certainly know what that sounds like. They like early rock n’ roll, and everyone has, at least, a vague idea about it. And they employ punk-rock dynamics. Even if you only know punk from Sex Pistols or The Clash, you have to be somewhat knowledgeable about it.
Bootleggers and Baptists’ “Take Me Home” brings down the house with a classic, bluesy garage-rock sound. In many ways, this song has all the ingredients meant to make you a true believer in the power of rock music once more. The bluesy riffs, the almost jazzy drums and the half-shouted vocals are things that could easily belong to other tunes. But there’s so much zest and excitement in what Bootleggers and Baptists do that you will swear you are hearing a truly unique group.
Cody Clinton and The April Fools – Bells at Night
Similar artists: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, M. Ward, T. Rex, Dire Straits, BRONCHO
Genre: Jangle Pop
You, too, will one day be completely and utterly out of style once again. I know, it’s hard to believe it. Imagine that, after all the work you must have out into getting your clothes and your haircut just right. The best thing that you can hope for is that once the word “retro” comes to define who you are, there will be enough depth to your personality so that it transcends the pains of being unfashionable.
Maybe you’ll be like Cody Clinton and The April Fools who are not casting their glances backwards out of pure nostalgia. No, they’re doing it because they’re convinced that’s where the good stuff’s hidden. They believe that the past didn’t really get a chance to be fully discovered. There’s still magic left to be uncovered.
There’s a great, weighty melancholy to Cody Clinton and The April Fools’ “Bells at Night.” However, there’s also an immediate vibrancy to the recording and a wonderful resonance that keeps this from falling into being merely a walk down Memory Lane. This is guitar-pop music for those who haven’t lost faith that more innocent are not lost forever.
