Sunday, August 12, 2012

CD Review : “Coast To Coast” River City Tanlines

BLM0263_RCTL_Cover

Coast to Coast

Here’s one to rock your summer as you cruise the beach, or the strip. Bass heavy, shred riffing, four on the floor Bangles meet The Runaways rock. It's a rad band from Memphis that features the songwriting, singing, and guitar playing of Alicja Trout. Bassist Terrence Bishop and drummer John Bonds, get the assist and have a fantastic pedigree in Delta blues backing such notables as  Jack Oblivian, R.L. Burnside, Jim Dandy & Black Oak Arkansas, and Monsieur Jeffrey Evans. The punk inspired, out-of- the garage-power trio will call to mind The Ramones, The Stooges and The Donnas .

“Stop My Heart”

Singer Alicja Trout who runs ContaminatedRecords, her recording studio and the bands Alicja-pop, MouseRocket and Black Sunday reconvenes  the Tanlines for the first time since 2006. She is a veteran of Memphis bands Lost Sounds (with Jay
Reatard), The Clears and many others.

The Tanlines have toured extensively in North American and Europe playing clubs and festivals and critical praise has been consistent, coming in from
the likes of David Fricke for Rolling Stone, SPIN and the LA Weekly. In 2009, they appeared in Craig Brewer's (Hustle and Flow, Black Snake Moan)
Five Dollar Cover web-series (and soundtrack) for MTV. Brewer also directed their roller derby-themed video for "I'm Your Negative".

“I’m Your Negative”

Coast to Coast was produced by Bruce Watson (Hasil Adkins, T-Model Ford, John Paul Keith) at his Dial Back Sound Studios – and released on his
Big Legal Mess Records which is distributed by Fat Possum. Coast to Coast contains ten tracks of hook-laden rock n' roll from Memphis, giving new
meaning to the term Dirty South.

For this much talent working on the project, I would have hoped for something that wasn’t quite so mindlessly formulaic and polished until the personality wore off. Not that the album doesn’t work, it just works like every other band knocking heads and cashing in on summer.RCT press kit photo 1

 

 

The Dirty Lowdown

Copyright © 2012 Robert Carraher All Rights Reserved

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