Damnwells – Bastards of the Beat
The album name is instructive: This Brooklyn twang-pop quartet aims to distance itself from a New York milieu currently being overrun by style-conscious rockisback! mooks and mickey-mouse post-punkateers. Much is also made in the group’s press releases about the drummer’s brief association with Whiskeytown and the fact that the band has toured with Rhett Miller, Cheap Trick and (urp!) Phantom Planet.
Musically, though, there’s nothing particularly bastardly about the Damnwells. (Well, the opening cut, a strummy 42-second fragment, is titled “Assholes”.) Promise surfaces initially with “What You Get”, a memorably clanging slab of power-pop directly descended from the Tommy Tutone classic “867-5309/Jenny”, and that’s followed by another winner, the yearning, Ryan Adams-like “Kiss Catastrophe”.
Quickly enough, though, the band detours at the city limits of Whiskeytown and heads off in the direction of Dullsville, rumblin’ down that same dusty ol’ highway previously journeyed by heartland hucksters the BoDeans. You know the drill: overly earnest lead vocals bolstered by soaring harmonies on the choruses, dynamics-attentive arrangements guaranteed to turn anthemic at drop of a plectrum, and “sensitive” lyrics relentlessly flogging the words “I” and “you” (what Steve Earle might call “chick songs”).
To be fair, the band has matured since a pair of unremarkable indie EPs in 2002, which the group refers to as the Poor Man’s Records. But maybe the Damnwells should have retained that sobriquet; pretty on the surface but deathly shallow, Bastards Of The Beat ultimately comes across as Poor Man’s Americana.