It's safe to say that, some 50 years after its birth, rock'n'roll has become a mostly interpretive art form, where ingenuity is measured not by the novelty of an idea as it is by ripping off the right people at the right time. Where bands like the Rapture and Interpol initially earned their hipster cachet for resuscitating then-dormant death-disco progenitors like Gang of Four and Joy Division, respectively, an emerging band today peddling those same influences would be laughed off the Lollapalooza side stage. However, given the stylistic depth and breadth of post-punk artists bubbling up in the UK in the late 1970s and early 80s, there are still plentiful untapped sources for new bands to plunder and thereby distinguish themselves-- and right now, Devon quintet the Rumble Strips have the Dexys Midnight Runners-revival field all to themselves.
For many (on North American shores particularly), Dexys are an 80s footnote survived only by periodic, oldies-radio rotation of their 1982 hit single "Come on Eileen", but the band's overlooked 1980 debut, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, is as vital a document of the era as any, even as it traded post-punk's traditionally icy veneer and ominous thrust for 60s-soul-inspired brass-blasted exuberance. And like their most obvious antecedents, the Rumble Strips are a band equally out of time-- in stark contrast to the prevailing nu-rave set's asymmetrical haircuts and cocaine cool, they project the polite, congenial demeanour of impoverished, neighbourhood newsboys. But if the Rumble Strips closely resemble Dexys both in sound and vision, they've also got a frontman, Charlie Waller, brimming with enough personality to match Kevin Rowland's ample charisma.
Where Rowland's default mode was impassioned pleading, Waller opts for charming self-deprecation-- right off that bat, he addresses the age-old conundrum of white performers appropriating black musical forms by baldy declaring, "I ain't got no soul!" Originally released as a 7" on Transgressive Records in 2005, "No Soul" serves as the most logical entry point to the Rumble Strips' long-gestating debut album, Girls and Weather, immediately establishing the band's favorite devices: Waller's soaring to-the-rafters vocals, a cavalry of chirpy trumpets that accelerate the action, and dramatic pauses that both heighten the tension and make the finales that much more triumphant. It's a formula the band repeat with equal aplomb on their winning 2007 single (also reprised here) "Motorcycle", a song about humble means ("if only this bike was a motorcycle") that, over four minutes of starts and stops, rev ups and breakdowns, achieves a hard-won grandeur, like Queen's "Somebody to Love" recorded on a busker's budget.
A whole album of these sort of showy gestures would likely prove exhausting, but the Strips are careful not to overdo it, and Girls and Weather is stacked with singles that condense the band's energy and enthusiasm into more compact bursts of joy: the cheeky anti-work song "Alarm Clock" ("I don't like doing things/ That other folks tell me to do/ So I hit 'em with a hammer"), and the irresistible "Girls and Boys in Love", which assumes a skiffle-band take on the classic "Heatwave" swing. It's no coincidence that Girls and Weather is named for what are the most interesting and the most boring things to talk about-- as its underdog anthems handily attest, the most mundane backdrops make the good things in life seem all the more glorious.
