Just as a new generation of musicians is finding inspiration in lo-fi indie from the early 1990s, Jack Yarber has more or less abandoned the scene for a grittier sound that's more junkyard than garage. A onetime member of Memphis stalwarts the Compulsive Gamblers and the Oblivians, he's also recorded a handful of albums under a variety of aliases, plying a mid-fi, R&B-tinged boogie rock that has more in common with Suicide or how you wish New York Dolls sounded than with his former projects. Rat City, released under the Jack Oblivian moniker, is a solo record in the truest sense, with Yarber playing almost all the instruments himself and only occasionally outsourcing to local musicians like librarian/badass Ross Johnson and local guitarist John Paul Keith. These songs are Camaro'ed out, streamlined for headlong tempos and seedy urgency.
Rat City is not ironic cock rock: Oblivian betrays no smirk, just a coolly stoic expression capped with dark sunglasses. What should be limiting, however, is instead a blueprint for a stylistically diverse album, one that changes shape and direction almost with every song. Rat City is a bustling, ungentrified metropolis: Memphis standing in for 1970s New York City. With its disco-derived bassline and close-to-the chest drumming, "Crime of Love" wields a mirrorball as a murder weapon, and Yarber's cover of "Moses & Me" mugs the Tommy James original, drenching it in distortion but maintaining the original blues-pop energy. His greatest reach may be the album's greatest payoff: Local indie-pop outfit Star & Micey back him on "Girl on the Beach", which sounds like boardwalk-era Springsteen and Dexys Midnight Runners kicking over Wavves' sandcastle. It's an adult summer anthem with a fall release, a discrepancy that more or less sums up the song's sense of wistful frustration with unattainable people and unreachable places.
The downside of this rambling aesthetic is that Yarber occasionally comes across as a cipher, too cool and detached to maintain a specific perspective from one song to the next. Instead, what threads the album together isn't his vocals or even the songwriting, but the guitars. Yarber is a slyly inventive player, deploying concise riffs in a variety of styles and changing them subtly with each repetition. By himself, he's a commanding presence, but he's even better when he can bounce off a second guitarist, like Keith or Jake Vest. They bluster bluesily through "Mass Confusion" and roll out Bakersfield variants on "Kidnapper", simultaneously enabling the stylistic digressions to cohere into a focused record. They lend Rat City its punk shrewdness and endow these songs with a prickly intelligence that makes what could have been dumb rock sound seriously smart.
