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OCTOBER NOVEMBER
(Lookout!)
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This scruffy Bay Area quartet search hard for an original route into the neo-garage fray on their second album. They beef up the Strokes’ jaunty guitar jangle with the White Stripes’ punk-blues bluster, then slather on a bit of the free-spirit abandon perfected by the X-led early-’80s LA punk set. Over the top of this twangy racket, singer Brady Baltezore parades the casual relationship with pitch that proves he really means what he’s singing. So perhaps it’s not that original. But a couple of times on October November, Black Cat Music come up with songs no leather-jacketed hipster would mind hearing if he couldn’t locate his copy of Pawn Shoppe Heart beneath an unruly pile of rolling papers. "The Jet Trash" is swinging Saturday-night fluff with a tasty chiming riff at its center; "The Cloud of Glass" rides a muscular groove borrowed from mid-period Sonic Youth; "The French Exit" piles up layers of gritty amp fuzz like dead leaves on the dirty ground. You wanted the best; you got the sixth- or seventh-best.
