White Reaper weren’t lying on The World’s Best American Band, but they were joking. The shitkicking Kentucky quintet seemed to have enough self-awareness to recognize that their craft —we’re comin’ to your town, we’ll help you party down—was no longer understood as a form of populism, but something as archaic and artisanal as, say, scrimshaw. They might as well be the only American band. So they must’ve been as surprised as anyone when Elektra called their sorta-bluff and made them one of the first new signings in the venerated label’s ambitious relaunch, otherwise focused on reliably massive pop-punk, metal, and country acts. But White Reaper hardly sound intimidated by the fact that You Deserve Love now bears the same logo as their treasured Cars, Metallica, Queen, and AC/DC records. They just went ahead and made the next White Reaper album.
“If you hate the new record, then you hate us. The major label didn’t do anything. You should at least know that all the blame is on our shoulders,” keyboardist/hypeman Ryan Hater said earlier this year, perhaps assuming heated discussions about selling out to accompany his band’s throwback aesthetic. Rest assured, there are no quasi-trap beats or forced duets or empowerment anthems like those that typify the radio-friendly unit shifters and mono-genre pop acts now flanking White Reaper on the Elektra website. Singles “Real Long Time” and “Might Be Right” are prime reasons the band considered Music For People Who Like Us as an album title. But there’s also none of the indulgences one could reasonably expect from a band that prophesied their own pill-popping, hotel-demolishing rock stardom two years ago—no string sections, no acoustic ballads. It’s actually their shortest album.
White Reaper justify their anachronistic existence the same way they did on The World’s Best American Band: By proving that “rockism vs. poptimism” is a modern creation. Their harmonized guitars, spring-loaded rhythms, and snotty hooks are all referential of Van Halen and Cheap Trick, some of the most popular musicians going in the ’70s and ’80s. White Reaper’s desire to really get on that echelon rather than merely evoke its essence results in the one noticeable Elektra-funded upgrade: You Deserve Love is produced by Jay Joyce, a guy who’s worked with Eric Church, Thomas Rhett, and Little Big Town, but also Cage the Elephant and FIDLAR—straightforward guitar acts whose enduring popularity and total lack of critical favor confound assumptions about rock bands in the streaming era.
While You Deserve Love is certainly slicker and more reliant on synths, it’s to the same degree that The World’s Best American Band was slicker and more synth-y than White Reaper Does It Again. More importantly, Tony Esposito continues to successfully walk the tightrope between dirtbag and douchebag, a guy who could easily be cast as a Linklater good ol’ boy with his own band soundtracking the latest well-meaning debauch. “I’ve brought too many drinks with me and a 10-ton bucket of gasoline,” he jokes on the bubbly dub verse of “Saturday.” He’s drunk on nearly every song, either out of spite or feelings of inadequacy or just a desire to escape.
But the guys Esposito sings about would be better served by some audible evidence that they’re going against the grain. Whether sanding off the grit of The World’s Best American Band was Joyce or White Reaper or Elektra’s idea, it nonetheless makes You Deserve Love less worthy of Camaro-revving fantasies, even if these total non-gearheads lean into them on “1F.” Watch the videos for “Real Long Time” or “1F” and White Reaper are no longer a throwback to Thin Lizzy or Cheap Trick, but to another fertile era for pop-leaning guitar music: The one that bridged the gap between the New Rock Revolution and The O.C., when dudes in denim jackets with snappy songs about booze and girls were getting snapped up by majors by the dozens. Think of Elevator-era Hot Hot Heat, the Thrills, Tokyo Police Club, or Phantom Planet, bands who pumped out enjoyable singles to sizable fanbases without ever worrying what their success indicated about the future of rock. Pointing out the thematic similarity of “1F” to Rooney’s “I’m Shakin’” is only an issue if you deny that “I’m Shakin’” still slaps.
This is how You Deserve Love can be a well-earned success while not feeling like a triumph, the way a filler-free major label debut should be for the rare band that outwardly aspires to it. While the title track of The World’s Best American Band was its only overtly conceptual song, the title itself created an unexpected emotional undercurrent for a band that prefers to be taken at face value. A modestly successful indie band from Louisville declares themselves as The Greatest before they knew they were: It’s wish fulfillment as transportative as any of the prog fantasies White Reaper’s idols put to tape. On You Deserve Love, the risk and rewards are lower: White Reaper aspire to be a very good American band.
Buy: Rough Trade
