Review Summary: Domo Arigato, Mr. Robot-O
La Scala-quality Sopranos they aren’t, but this brand of gutter rock hardly calls for it. “Sympathy Sessions” is the sound of a band hell-bent on Breaking Bad, a Flying Circus of false starts, crazed solos and twitchy menace. These are not the sound of the Hart of Dixie, or some Smallville in Dallas, Eerie, Indiana or even Gotham. It is southern comfort that ditched the good book for some Black Books instead. Rather than adorn songs with unnecessarily lofty instrumentation, the band choose instead to Halt and Catch Fire, sending electric impulses wobbling through The Wire of your brain synapses.
That nihilistic distortion runs through their Bloodline, making all previous constructivist ideas of how rock music is to be played fall apart like a House of Cards, familiar and yet beautifully odd, a formerly pure sound reflected through a Black Mirror. It’s a fair question to ask whether one is Justified in heaping so much hyperbolic praise onto a band whose very ideology seems to lean toward obscure underachievement, and that the listener should perhaps feel the pressure to Curb Your Enthusiasm, as the band won’t be reigning over popular charts anytime soon. But acknowledgement is hardly a potent stimulus for a group of musicians whose sole purpose is to M*A*S*H rock n’ roll into a buzzing cluster, stripping songs of all excess fat, the way a tree does with Deadwood.
The band shatter and squeal like Mad Men, or a Banshee caught in the Twilight Zone, a hallucination from the land of Oz, and Jack Oblivian’s unearthly scream, buried Six Feet Under a skittish wall of warped feedback, is a wickedly stirring Carnivale of strident apathy, while his fictive brother-in-arms Greg Oblivian pleads for a woman to Rescue Me from the previous woman. These songs are roiling immediate, and don’t keep you waiting, sometimes lashing out two cracking solos in less than two minutes of runtime, the creaking crescendos almost terrifying in speed and weight, like a breaker with Twin Peaks.
Aside from Jack Daniels and Elvis Presley, this music just may be the best Tennessee export around, a worthy tribute to their Homeland, enough to forever be absolved from the long grim list of rock history’s Leftovers.
This music’s evil intellect, carefully camouflaged, resembles the subtle ways of Dr. No, the first proper villain of the James Bond franchise. Dr. Who? you may ask. Your parents will explain.
For all its simplicity and supposed renunciation, “Sympathy Sessions” is a record of purpose, deliberately placing indulgent 80’s rock’s guitar showmanship into a state of Arrested Development, and infusing the songs with a giddy anxiety, the way Socrates would have felt if tossed into a Hemlock Grove. And everyone can find some scrap of light in these Tales from a Crypt. Jocks, art students, do-gooders, nogoodniks, Freaks & Geeks and all your good Friends are all welcome to this frenzied sonic feast from the Masters of Sex and drugs and rock n’ roll.
The band has found new life several times, as garage rock fluctuated in and out of fashion, bolstered by waves of revival, and Oblivians may one day rise again, who knows, Stranger Things have happened. For now, they’ll be Pushing Daisies on our airwaves, if not our hearts. And if they ever are completely forgotten, it’ll be something that generations of future scrappy young guitar-wielding kids will forever try to Rectify.
