Foot on the monitor. Fist in the air. Heads down, no nonsense, boogiesome punk ‘n’ roll! Let’s go! Who’s in? Of course you are.
“Lifetime Ago Go” is not only a great opening salvo to Tides Will Turn’s debut album, but it also reminds us that punk was just another brand of rock and roll… isn’t everything. It blends the right amount of scuzzy riffing with Mick Jones-esque razor wire melodies, and if you aren’t doing Joe Strummer howls in the spaces between the opening staccato riffs of “American Sole” then you obviously weren’t there …maan! (And probably never will be.)
It isn’t all a Ladbrooke Grove history lesson, far from it, and by the time “American Dream” rolls around, it is the West Coast goes Alabama truck stop drawl of Creedence Clearwater Revival vibe that soaks through its proto-punk country rock moves and grooves.
“The Shining” is Tides Will Turn, telling us that, for all their cool influences and cooler record collection, they are their own band, and here they blend blues guitar lines over a crawling, seductive bayou groove; you can feel the heat rising off every note, every tattooed beat.
There is even room for a retooling and sonic retelling of “Dancing in the Dark,” Springsteen’s I wrote a single because the record label insisted classic, sounding like the recently unearthed wrong-side-of-the-tracks 60’s garage band original, and all the better for it.
Rock ‘n’ roll trends come and go, but what lies at the heart of all great bands is that groove and grit, that sense of free-spiritedness, that simple (yet more complex than it looks) shotgun delivery of sass and seduction, excitement and energy, and that thrill of hanging out with the wrong (yet, of course, right) crowd. Tides Will Turn has all of that and more.
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