Album Review: The Beets' Stay Home

Straight out of Queens, The Beets strive for a sound 50 years in the making. Taking cues from seminal British Invasion bands, '60s west coast surf-garage rock and more directly, New York icons such as The Velvets and Television, The Beets' vintage, garage rock is stripped down, back to the basics retro. The past year saw the band touring behind their 2009 release, Spit In The Face Of People Who Don't Want To Be Cool, and releasing several singles including, (just so you know where their heads are at) a drunken rendition of "The Locomotion" (yes, the one and only, but without the chart topping results earned by Little Eva, Grand Funk and Kylie). Needless to say, many weren't quite ready for a band with such a wry sense of humor and a recorded sound that was willfully underproduced.

The band's sophomore release, Stay Home, picks up where the trio's previous effort left off. The jangly hooks are still very raw and outweigh any notions of studio amateurism - oddly, it's what makes The Beets' sound so charming. "Cold Lips," kicks the album into full gear with its singalong qualities while "Dead" could be mistaken for a Stones b-side.

Spanning 13 songs with a running time under half an hour, the album isn't much to dissect. In fact, many songs are about staying home - go figure. "Watching TV" and "Pops N' Me" are pretty self explanatory. "Hens and Roasters," meanwhile, is a soft story about isolation: "Now I wanna go back to my head," sings guitarist/vocalist Juan Wauters and bass player Jose Garcia as they harmonize through the outro as they so often do on the record. When the duo aren't singing in unison, they often take a few bars to break down in psychedelic Velvets' inspired freakouts like the "Knock On Wood" outro or the second half of "Your Name Is On My Bones."

While The Beets approach their music with the type of inspiration that isn't new - the charm factor and overall sincerely has high appeal. As Spit In The Face... may have shown promise, its fidelity surely lacked, hiding the talent behind a wall of fuzz. Stay Home sheds a layer allowing the audience to hear what they've been missing - and they have been missing out - and allowing the band to step out of the cult-y, art-house world and into the clubs.

Published by Treble Magazine

Album Review: Smith Westerns' Dye It Blonde

Last year was a growing period for Smith Westerns, the Chicago garage pop quartet whose prior year's self-titled debut caught many by surprise with dreamy, innocent pop harmonies and overall maturity from a band who at the time, were still in high school. The band toured non-stop in 2010, honing their chops, learning to play tighter and ultimately working as a well-oiled machine. In doing so, they have expanded their audience exponentially, all the while gaining solid critical success. And with more experience comes a brand new stage for the band as they offer up an excellent sophomore set in Dye It Blonde.

In November, leading up to the album, the band released the first single, "Weekend," which naturally stirred up hype and anticipation, and with good reason. The song kicks things off with signature guitar jangle and three-minute power-pop structure, not to mention a memorable chorus of blissful falsetto harmonies. What stands out across this new set is the heightened level of maturity to the band's garage rock stylings -- "Imagine Pt.3" is an unabashedly catchy love pop song, with frontman Cullen Omori delivering lines like, "You've always got me coming back for more." Influences like T Rex shine through on tracks like "All Die Young" while the band sticks to their bread-and-butter lo-fi hooks on "End Of The Night" and "Dance Away."

It is hard to believe at times that the band is collectively around 19 years old - "Smile" ends with a prog-rock, singalong outro, revealing ambition and craftsmanship far beyond their years. With the jump to Fat Possum, the songs are crisp and better produced, but still remain lo-fi and often ooze a retro feel - something that carries over from the debut.

With a solid new set of material, Smith Westerns have returned to reveal how much creative growth they've undergone in such a short amount of time. Resurrecting all the right bits of T. Rex and The Replacements, while echoing contemporary sidekicks like Girls, Smith Westerns have released the first great album of 2011. The great thing, though, is that they have only just begun.

Published by Treble Magazine