Some Kind of Cowboy

Rough riders: Love Tentacle Drip Society proves this town ain’t big enough for its inventive debut record, Some Kind of Cowboy.

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I remember distinctly the moment in my adolescence when I decided that rock music was cool.

My peers were all starting bands, so I tried to learn how to play the guitar. As I struggled—to this day, I still only know two chords—I suddenly felt silly for wasting several years in the school concert band. Nirvana, after all, did not have a trumpet player. In my 13-year-old estimation, the guitar was the instrument of coolness; flutes, trombones and kettle drums were for nerds.

If the members of Love Tentacle Drip Society encountered this false dichotomy at any point in their development, they certainly don’t show it. On the contrary, they seem to have embraced both the exuberance of rock and the instrumentation of dorks on their debut album, Some Kind of Cowboy, without the slightest bit of self-consciousness.  Cowboy was recorded locally by Lance Brenner, and the first 50 copies come packaged in an overly large cardboard pony—already a more adventurous start than most local bands could dream of.

And it is an adventurous group of young chaps: The governing body of Charlottesville’s nastiest society consists of Charles Carrier on vibraphones, Jameson Zimmer on banjo and vocals, Sean Zimmer on drums and Nicholas "Max" Dreyer on guitar, but the foursome switches instruments often. Everyone seems to take a turn on keyboards and, during their live show, it’s not uncommon for Carrier to literally leap back and forth from vibraphones to drums between every song. The vocals (another shared duty) typically alternate between lighthearted sincerity and sarcastic falsetto. They have more in common with legendary weirdos like Frank Zappa than one might expect from a band whose members are mostly still in high school.

Though it occasionally resembles a medley of absurd vaudeville acts, Cowboy is quite consistent and coherent, especially considering the disparate moments that it manages to tie together. Take the energetic vibraphone/guitar breakdown of "And Then I Started Thinking About My Sister;" the sensitive pseudo-Appalachia of "Mountain Man;" the bleeping alienation of "Future is Today;" the perverse cocktail-lounge charm of "Too Young to be a Dad;" and the drum-fueled fury of "Tom Baker," their almost-unrecognizable cover of the "Doctor Who" theme.  

The puzzling thing about LTDS is that, despite the silly ideas and juvenile whimsy, there’s also a remarkable amount of quality control and great ear for what actually works, musically. The album wanders amiably through several short songs at a brisk pace, and includes several instrumental rockers and ambient interludes that tie the album together and help to balance out a few of the goofier moments.

Things don’t really fly off the rails until the album’s last few "hidden tracks" (an idea whose time has passed, I think, in the age of the MP3). Even then, the problem is the result of poor sequencing rather than aesthetically questionable content; these four bonus breakdowns would have fit nicely anywhere else on the disc.

The Tentacles appear to be channeling some previously unknown, schizophrenic muse.  Despite rumors of a hiatus while one member goes off to college, I’m sure we’ll hear more from the members of LTDS in one chaotic form or another. For now, I just have to find room on my CD shelf for this giant cardboard pony.