Ah, this is such stuff as beer commercials and Super Bowl ads are made on. Corn-fed Iowa blues-rock trio Radio Moscow have taken a number and are currently waiting in line at the revival deli, hoping today's special will be watered-down sports bar rock. Go ahead, try listening to the first 30 seconds of their self-titled debut without having a Pavlovian flashback to schlubby thirtysomethings high-fiving in a bar as girls in bikinis chug drinks and play touch-football on the Rocky Mountains.
It's a shame the band's sound elicits this sort of reaction. They're not a misogynistic or dim-witted collection of musicians; they just haven't considered the world outside the piles of guitar chord and scale charts that presumably consumed their youth. As a result of sheer serendipity, Black Keys member Dan Auerbach tucks these greenhorns under his wing, offering to produce their debut after frontman Parker Griggs gave him the band's demo at a Keys show. Unfortunately, Auerbach's not exactly the alchemist to transmute these lumps of lead into gold, especially after his own band's lackluster 2006 album, Magic Potion.
This album's most distinguishing characteristic is easily how indistinguishable these songs are from each other. Several of them sound like they're named after touristy Southern bars ("Lickskillet", "Luckydutch", "Mistreating Queen") and all of them feel content with burying Briggs' already muffled vocals in wah-wah guitars and gratuitous mid-song jams. There's only one change-of-pace number on the album, the Far East-tapping "Ordovician Fauna", though even that track merely swaps boring pentatonic riffs for boring Indian scale riffs.
Some areas where the band could really rally around: "Timebomb" has a decent melody, and for the split-second of the chorus where Briggs jumps up an octave to deliver a lovelorn yelp, you feel like the song's actually building towards something. Then poof-- a non-descript lick takes over, the pounding, staccato rhythm sections melts into predictable downbeat flab, and Radio Moscow attempt to once again try blowing your mind with a garden variety "jam." The chic criticisms of Cream/Led Zep/Hendrix thievery don't even apply to these classic rock throwbacks-- the band's not swiping full-fledged ideas from anyone. They're barely recreating anything more complicated than atonal finger exercises, a drawback that ultimately makes this debut such a bitch slap to the face of the musical genre that helped proliferate words like "hook" and "riff" in our lexicon.
