New album "Kick Out the Lights" is a tic under 23 minutes and good for two invigorating listens on the otherwise prosaic drive from Salem to Portland. The ramshackle assault that so often in punk means cheap menace and hyper frustration is here a raw exuberance, youth and wisdom deflecting off each other.
It's rare for revved-up punk to have such resonance. Too often in this genre a track of, say, two minutes (like the fantastic "Sweat" on this album) is 18 seconds of cool introduction and then it quickly overstays its loud welcome. "Sweat," however, should be two minutes longer. Its swaggering tone is mitigated by ambiguous backing vocals (a fierce and determined yelp of "Sweat!" that is reminiscent of Poly Styrene's athletic snarl, but what is the word insisting upon? Is that an order or just a recapitulation?) The great Buzzcocks-sounding guitar that closes the track secures it as one of the album's strongest. Like "Gimme Your Love" and "Murderer's Thumb" (love the unexpected piano plink in the bridge), "Sweat" is a major-league song on what sounds more and more like a major-league record. Listing forebears is such a lazy move -- the mark of a tired reviewer -- but when I listen to "Lights" I'm hearing shouts and crashes of predecessors beyond the Dolls and The Stooges. I hear Mission of Burma in the scratch and grain of the vocals, and in the way the chord changes so aptly parallel shifts in the mood. Gang of Four are here, too, and on "Hard Workin' Baby" the Strippers somehow straddle the fine line between acceptable honky-tonk shtick and regrettable blues-bar kitsch -- it's Reverend Horton Heat's souped-up hearse driving a little too close to George Thorogood's El Camino, but it stays on the road. "Make It" takes the Modern Lovers'
"Roadrunner" in a wilier direction. "Sugar Kiss" is like a more hopeful version of the story told in "Murderer's Thumb." Album closer "Roxie" highlights David Ballantyne's whiskey-dipped (not yet weary, not yet soaked) vocals and an intriguing riff that effectively makes the band's name perfectly apt: these are laughing, sexy distortionists at play.