At their almost weekly shows in town, Drunk Tigers have secured their place as Charlottesville’s go-to goodtime band. Put on their new EP Black Square and all of a sudden it’s five o’clock, the dudes are here and beer’s in the fridge.
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Drunk Tigers’ Black Square EP will be released alongside EPs by Corsair and Red Satellites at the Southern on February 20. |
“Lessons, Hurricane” opens with some of the band’s best attributes: funny lyrics sung in a surreally great rock and roll voice, incessantly hummable guitar lines and a ramshackle rhythm section. In “Lessons, Hurricane,” songwriter Matt Bierce repeats with conviction, “I want to go home,” before undercutting the sentiment with slang: “Where have my homies gone?” Through the EP’s four tracks, the lyrics continue to traffic in declarations that are somewhere between confusing and compelling. In “Photos of Sad Brokers,” Bierce sings, “It’s not my birthday, it’s not my problem.” Like many of the greatest lyrics, I’m not sure what it means, but it sure sounds good.
Guitarist Zach Carter takes on vocal duties for “Small Town,” where he sings, “After seven years I can’t believe I’m still around this small town.” It’s an ode to all the UVA graduates whose big-city aspirations get drowned in booze. But Charlottesville begins to sound like paradise when he growls, “ten minutes gets you from the front porch to the bar.” Here, drummer Mike Parisi’s pounding sounds less rigid than it did on the band’s demo from last year, providing a sturdier backbone for Drunk Tigers’ dual riffage and Dan Sebring’s basswork.
Where songs on the band’s first EP had titles like “Outer Banks/Inner Peace” and “Groundhog’s Date,” “Small Town” and “Tightrope” show a band more comfortable taking emotion at face value, and not hiding behind puns. On Black Square, Drunk Tigers take a step towards a simplicity that resembles maturity. That simplicity also resembles The Replacements, the proto-indie rockers who did as much as any other band in the 1980s to elevate teenage boredom and angst to an art form.
In this radio-ready EP, Drunk Tigers continue their mystical research at the pantheon of bands-with-four-dudes. They’ve succeeded in summoning influences from The Replacements to Archers of Loaf, Television to The Cars. In other words: Work’s out, dudes are here and there’s plenty of beer.
