Poor St. Paul, Minnesota. Perennially overshadowed by its big brother Minneapolis in the Twin Cities tag-team, St. Paul is the jelly to Minneapolis' peanut butter, having to constantly remind tourists and map makers that it hasn't been swallowed up by its neighbor to the west. Sure, all the nice people I know from Minnesota insist that St. Paul is where the real action is, but I'm not convinced that all the little St. Paulians don't harbor a serious inferiority complex against their conjoined sibling.
Perhaps it's that very psychological scar that has St. Paul's The Selby Tigers so darn hoppin' angry. After all, at one point on this record, singer/guitarist Nathan Grumdahl simultaneously boasts and pleads that "this is an underground town, underground and secret at best!" Of course, since the Tigers don't hail from the nouveau garage rock capitals of Detroit, NYC, or, uh, Sweden, it's understandable that they might be a bit defensive about the humble Midwestern setting for their own carport jams (even going so far as to namedrop St. Paul's illustrious Selby Avenue in their bandname). To compensate for this geographic handicap, the band's gotta strum them guitars just a little bit harder, kick up the drumbeat just a little bit faster, and make their album sound just a little more raggedy.
Which is pretty much what the Selby Tigers do on their second album, The Curse of the Selby Tigers. And I dare say they throw down the rawk pretty well. Like most bands of the gee-rage scene (by my Warhol watch, now on it's 11th minute), the Tigers owe a lot more to late-70s punk than to the Count Five and "Mony Mony," and with their male/female vocal dynamic, one often expects them to start chanting "Johnny hit and run Pauline" at any moment. Hey, these kids are even married, and the marital vibe gives them a torn-jeans leg up on their peers, with Grumdahl's snotty punk vox clashing lovingly against spouse Arzu Gokcen's gallant attempts to critically injure her vocal cords.
Such beautiful punk-rock chemistry is absolutely necessary to deliver a song like "Punch Me in the Face (With Your Lips)" with the proper amount of gutter romance (does St. Paul have gutters?). Grumdahl and Gokcen have obviously perfected the ancient art of Fleetwood Mac-itude, giving each of their songs that "are they singing about each other?" edge that makes for delightfully uncomfortable listening. Not that their songs are all valentine hearts and candy boxes; a wide variety of topics are covered lyrically. "Cheerleading Is a Big Business," for instance, features the telling line, "All the jocks WOAH kitzo kitzo!" or... something. Okay, so the lyrics are kind of hard to discern, but you don't exactly look for Dylan in a group like this.
Generally, the Selby Tigers' one-take-and-print-it, rumble-bass, surfy-drums, spit-on-the-microphone, dive bar soundtracks are above average (say, 70th percentile). The band even genuinely hits the jackpot once with "Down in Uppertown" and its ominous "roll with me tonight" pre-chorus bridge. Conversely, they also hit the crap-pot twice with the cutesy irony-overkill of "The Prom I Never Had" and a failed attempt at scariness on "Neighbor with a Defect." Everything else is unsurprising but agreeable jump-up-and-down music, great for working those quads and bothering the financial consultants downstairs. If they complain, just tell 'em you're helping some St. Paulians wrestle with their subconscious feelings of neglect and inadequacy. They'll understand.
