'Hey, this will take you back! Rock and Roll of the kind they used to make when the kids from Dazed & Confused were still at school. From a Seattle band that has just released their eponymous debut album. It's all clean licks, simplicity and sunshine. I thought of early Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and Dwight Twilley. Hardly a bad thing. The record's a breeze.
It's all unashamedly retro. There's not a note on here that you couldn't imagine being recorded pre-nineteen eighty. I suppose how far you go for it will depend on how sold you are on its source material. I certainly am, and Bread & Butter are a welcome reminder of all that. Also, as is so often the case nowadays, they actually do it all rather better on occasion than some of their formative influences.
It's a reinvention of the past not too dissimilar to the trick pulled off, (more than fifteen years back), by The Strokes' Is This It, in their respect in terms of all the things that made the CBGBs scene so wonderful. Of course Bread & Butter is not going to change the world the way that record did. Partly because the songs here are for the most part gently pleasing rather than genuinely thrilling the way The Strokes first songs were, and we've also become so used to this kind of wholesale pillaging of the wardrobes of the past nowadays. Nevertheless I love the record on its own merits, ultimately which come down to the strength of the songs and trust me, the songs are strong!'
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