Happenin Records has hit the mainline, tapping into the Americana zeitgeist often ignored for Route 66 and backporch nostalgia. I know I’ve fallen into that trap, as has the sort of garage rock Happenin buys stocks in with each release. And yet that sort of bread and butter version of rustic songs being banged and scrapped out of hovels and basements is no longer the same Dick Dale surfing dream of old. It’s barely Californian anymore if not for the hazy feel of the best garage prognosticators eking it out in middle America. Such goes Eleven Year Old, who hit my jammed radar for the first time with American Lizards. Being one to avoid hyperbole and proverb, let me hamfist this up by saying American Lizards is album of the year material for the garage rock set. Its steely bends, frenetic pacing and psychedelic shellac are all comforting forms of the genre scrunching together in an attic riddled with ancient artifacts long left to the dust bunnies and spiders. The giant billow of microscopic granules that rise from Eleven Year Old’s din isn’t to raise forgotten slices of Americana to prominence but rather akin to the plethora of relic hunters scouring every hoarder’s premises. They find that piece of lost freedom that tickles a niche. Such goes American Lizards, so while most will ignore it because the prospect of this much outlandish fun runs contrary to the serious reminisces of what passes for Americana, the dust cloud that causes the big sneeze among Eleven Year Old’s niche will be a welcome explosion of real happiness escaping every orifice.
More about: Eleven Year Old
