Don’t mess with Texas’s Strange Boys: some Austinite Nietzsche reading lo-fi punk-rockers, who just released their first major record, The Strange Boys and Girls Club. The Sambol brothers (Ryan, guitar/lead vocals, writes all the songs and his elder, Phillip, bass) started the band, are now accompanied by another guitartist (that’s right), Greg Enlow, a guy named Hammer on drums, and a fellow named Neeley on the keys. The top-track, “Woe is You and Me,” stands out in its amped woozy blues, epitomizes the kind of drunken, at times nihilistic vibe that these Strange Boys emanate. Ryan’s voice is at times distractingly Dylany, but the beauty about that nasal rasp is that the ‘original’, Dylan’s I mean, was an impression of the timeless nasally Blues masters, so Sambol effectively makes it his own. These guys love John Lennon. Track three, “Should Have Shot Paul,” pretty explicitly asserts that Mark David Champman “Shot the wrong moptop.” I also had the tune of the top-track (see above) stuck in my head, and couldn’t figure out what Beatles tune it was. Turned out “Oh Yoko” was the one, not the Beatles but John’s very own, off of Imagine. You can listen to the two, and make your own judgment. Moptops aside, the Strange Boys’ witty lyrics, some great rockabilly rollin, and that grubbier stuff (colored something blue, green or somethin in between) that sits under any real punks, screams some real art that had me listening to the album a second, third, fourth time. In fact, number five’s under way.
SEE 13th Floor Elevators, Black Lips
-SNICK