On their first three for the most part excellent records, Brooklyn-via-Philly punk and rock and rock & roll revivalists Low Cut Connie partied like their biggest worldly concern was trying to find the next good excuse to dump a bunch of Yuengling on their drummer. But the weight of the world is really with them on album four, and it's helped add depth and power to their music: "Never paid attention in my twenties," Adam Weiner sings over a roadhouse garage-soul boogie "Death And Destruction," a come-to-Jesus with reality that parties on the edge of apocalypse.
The Connies traveled to Memphis to record at Ardent
Studios, where the Replacements and Big Star made great records, and their mix
of Seventies Stones (but dirtier), the New York Dolls (but tighter) and Jerry
Lee Lewis (but Westerberg-ier) comes with an extra sense of bare-knuckled grit
and sonic thwump to fight against the darkness. "Revolution Rock &
Roll" is a slamming gospel-tinged get-woke anthem, while the strikingly
spare piano ballad "Montreal" evokes Big Star's "Thirteen"
and Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," and turns on the lines "I
gave conjunctivitis to a girl in a bar/I gave conjunctivitis like a star."
Death also haunts the album via a fine cover of Prince's "Controversy,"
and "Forever," which laments fallen music heroes with a Tom
Waits-at-closing-time ragged beauty. The LP ends with "What Size Shoe,"
a war cry of personal and political abjection that creeps like side four of
Exile On Main Street and ends with Weiner asking "Ain't this the United
States/Ain't this the home of the brave?" Maybe not anymore. But this
record proves they're ginned up for the resistance.
