Buffalo holds a special place,
alongside Detroit, Cleveland, and dozens of other new, little
Ohio/Penn/Mich ghost towns, in the corridor of old American
industrial powerhouses of some bygone, pre-Reagan Steel Age. The city
was once, along with so many other Rust Belt enclaves, a beacon of
prideful and turgid industriousness. But then everyone got laid off.
And as everyone got laid off, some cranking rock and roll bands
scored the Constellation of Life in the Steel Belt. For whatever reason, the domestic economy collapsed, and that Belt began
to oxidize and decay. And now, some twenty or thirty years later, a handful of
Upstate kids have begun to hammer out cranking rock and roll in the
vein of what their dads presumably cranked on their way to work, the
day or days leading up to that sad, sad lay-off.
Grimace, Handsome Jack, Chylde, The
Found, Thrill Me!, Buffalo Killers, Family Township. A ton of nearby
bands have treaded this throwback corridor, to varying degrees of
response for years. But really, until now, no one has consolidated so
many threads of Good-Ol-Boys, classic rock, so much as the
quartet, Cosmic Shakedown, and not so comprehensively as on their
debut LP, Fake American Dream (released on vinyl this week - so so so
appropriately).
Fake American Dream is a Who's Who of
homages. It's a team of four Good-Ol-Dudes blasting
Good-Ol-Rock-and-Roll out of retro amps, scoring a Constellation of
Cranking-Rock. It's also the debut record from Cosmic Shakedown, a
band I was once wary of, but now, given the work they've put into constant gigging, solidifying their sound, and given the luxury of being able to hear it on vinyl, have to humbly hand it to. And, along with the recent departure of White Bison and The Found from our little
scene, I'd welcomingly welcome the Good-Ol Shakedown Boys as heirs to
our Rust Belt Blues Throne.
In FAD, every divergent thread of Rust
Belt Blues is represented. To hear them shift from one song to
another is to lift the needle off Wishbone Ash and line up some Molly
Hatchet. Or to fastforward from Blue Cheer to Alice In Chains. From the
sampled opening of "The Next F.A.D." to the Drinking Game Dare of “All Too Much,”
FAD is an indelibly “Buffalo” recording.
There's a couple throw-aways: “Wore
Fair” is some semi-cheesy 12-bar-leaning boogie, rife with silly
“take me home” lyrics. And “Dizzease” sprawls from
Patton-inspired to Portrait of an American Family-sounding (and I'm
simply not sure if it's okay to be “okay” with that comparison, though I don't mean it in a bad way),
especially where the voice and drums are concerned. That said, Cosmic Shakedown manage to
ameliorate upon an extensive field of influences, and even
throw-aways like these make me crave seeing the band live again, very
soon.
And sometimes, more
often than not: the record gets absolutely awesome. The
first side closes with the incendiarily paired “Alibi/ High Noon.”
“Alibi” starts with some sparse guitar jangling. A minute or so
in, the rhythm kick up a notch or two, and before you know it,
guitarists Josh Gartley and Tony Nash are interweaving one of the
coolest dual-licks to hit any of our ears in some time. And when
Gartley jumps in with the early refrain, “Where has all that good
old rock and roll gone?” all of a sudden, the whole
cranking-rock-on-your-way-to-a-1970s-layoff I opened with makes too
much frustrating, frustrating sense.
And then the driving, pained “High
Noon.” And then you flip the record for the Southern-influenced
“Rusty Tracks,” and on into some sturdy good times.
It is a good time. I hope you pick up Fake American Dream.
And on vinyl.
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