This is real life, you know, not some simulacrum. This isn’t a post-internet mélange of fragmented digital imagery, rendered in code, fully polygonal, repurposed for maximum irony-not-irony, mulched by algorithms and collected by web-page spider programs, polished to a sheen, and piped through the malls and offices of future Earth. That is, it’s not what those corporate fatcats at Tiny Mix Tapes WANT you to hear. No, this is music for PEOPLE, not machines. Real life.
Real Life Rock & Roll. That’s what this quartet — Aaron Oppenheim, Blaine Todd, Scott Siler, and Andrew Weathers (who has basically mixed or mastered pretty much every imaginable underground release) — is chuckin’. To say that the band easily locks into grooves with one another is an understatement; almost the entirety of Hollerin’ the Spirit (on Oakland label Geomancy) unfolds under a dusty motorik vision of Americana, where guitars chime like sunbeams and the entirety of the country billows with a ramshackle charm. The five tracks that RLR&RB have dreamed up stretch like the miles of highway crisscrossing the country, building in intensity when whatever distant destination they’re aiming for finally appears over the horizon.
But the trip itself is the draw. You travel with the band, you breathe the air, you see the sights. You LIVE – not in the backseat of a gross tour van, but in the emotive propulsion of the spirit of the journey. Every grand, shining riff connects one mile marker to the next, and the workmanlike approach to track construction reveals the true spirit of camaraderie evident in the music.
It’s like the Real Life Rock & Roll Band is workshopping the new American paradigm in real time, right before our noses.
That’s because, wait for it … it’s real life.
Take THAT Tiny Mix Tapes, fatcats!
Ow, hey, get your hands off me, I’m not done typing …
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