IT ALL FEELS GOOD
Urchin Urchin Urchin… Emergency!
By Contributing Writer, 10-10-05
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| The Sound of Urchin | |
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By Brian Staker
As much as anything else, rock music is about gesture: the swagger, the fist-pounding, the sheer
abandon of it. And pop music is supposed to bring a smile to your face or a tear to your eye. The
mainstream music industry has forgotten this in their apparent attempts to thwart ‘pirating’ by dispensing dreck that you’d think nobody would want to steal. But no one, least of all major labels, ever went broke underestimating consumers’ intelligence, and people gobble it up.
Then way below the radar, in ‘indie music,’ which simply means bands that haven’t been co-opted by corporate wheels, there is almost complete freedom (read: not even trying to make much of a living) to poke ironic comment at pop music and culture in general. New Yorkers The Sound of Urchin just take their inspiration from people like Thin Lizzy and Def Leppard rather than the 60's music that people like Yo La Tengo and Pavement listened to; this is not your older brother’s indie rock. But drummer/singer Tomato and bassist Reverend B. Ill perform with Dean and Gene Ween in side project The Moistboyz. If that isn’t enough cred, they’ve been on major label RCA but moved to indie Hybrid for this one.
Sound of Urchin's latest album The Diamond may be named after the hardest natural substance known to man, but that doesn’t mean SoU is afraid of being soft. The album opens with “Police Helicopters Over Brooklyn,� an amazing slab of bubblegum that somehow manages to capture the paranoia and exhilaration of living in the post-911 Big Apple. Are they busting your buddy, or Bin Laden? Then the anthemic “Jack-O-Lantern,� frames social commentary in a song about trick-or-treating. The lo-ball slink of “There Are People In the Clouds� ends its hallucinogenic chorus of “Wanna get to know? This is how to know!� into the hardcore punk of “Bomb Me.� You get the feeling SoU would still be partying as the proverbial bombs were falling. That’s not exactly right. They ‘keep it so (sur)real’ all the way through, that they’d probably just have a really nice stash in their bomb shelter. This is the New York of everyone from Madonna to the Robert Deniro of both Taxi Driver and the Amex ads to lovable loudmouth cabbies and coffee shop jerks who try to steal your donut to shelter denizens.
But it’s beside the point to dissect The Diamond, it’s just too multi-faceted. Not that they are schizophrenic, they just have all the moves down. They could go from bone-crushing chord progressions to incendiary guitar solos to stop-on-a-dime transitions into a doowop chorus and segue into a power ballad. Are they this year’s The Darkness? The Sound of Urchin has a lot more tricks up its sleeves. And damn, it all feels good!
The Sound of Urchin plays on Thursday, October 13 at Monk's House of Jazz. For more information, visit www.loficafe.com.
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