
Flashlight Faces – Things That Walked
You used to be able to look at many rock musicians and imagine all of the crazy things that they must have done before settling on this career. And nice, cute-crazy, either. The majority of them looked, walked, and talked like people who got thrown out of the circus. You wouldn’t have been surprised to hear they did time or ran away from some kind of weird experiment conducted by the army.
Those freaks turned rock ‘n roll into something of a Golden Era. You now look upon the few young rock stars that we have, and it’s hard to imagine anything like that. I mean, sure, judging by eyewitness accounts, some of them get off to no good. But they do it in remote hotel rooms and dark cellars. The rest of the time, they walk, sound, and talk like they’ve just completed their studies in accounting.
I don’t know if the people behind Flashlight Faces’s “Things That Walked,” but, at the very least, the song allows me to imagine this. It’s modeled after the bizarre horror fantasies and conspiracy theories that made the music of people like Roky Erickson such a force to be reckoned with. “Things That Walked” sounds like Halloween music for people who treat Halloween like a religious holiday.
Thunder Boys – I Need a Hug
All of the prophecies talk about people fated to walk the world their entire lives, going from city to city, doing their best to convince people to buy into what they are doing. They just didn’t mention that most of them would have guitars strapped to their backs or that they’d try to win their living singing songs and telling the world all about itself.
It’s hard to say for sure whether these people walked into this or if, indeed, they were chosen by fate itself. Then again, it’s not easier to tell whether working musicians put up for all of this for their sake, or for that of the people that they are singing for. Still, one thing is clear, and that is that musicians who come bearing bad news forego their chance, however small, of being treated as beloved guests when they turn themselves into veritable apostles for the world’s ruin.
Thunder Boys have no good news to share, no silver linings to point you toward, and no time to tell you it’s all going to be OK. Their retro-tinged psychedelic rock of “I Need a Hug” sounds like a love song to an end.
It’s not the first that the people involved in this project have taken a drive down dark pathways of the past. Tyson Vogel is half of the dynamic duo Two Gallants, one of the very best bands of recent decades and masters of old-fashioned musical storytelling.
Should fans of that group wonder whether Thunder Boys’ music is enough to get them excited, they need not worry or fear that this is too similar musically to that.