The question we have to ask ourselves is, can we continue singing rock & roll without seeming ridiculous or out of date? And then the answers can be various, if at the height of this music, say around 1970 or 1971, a great swing band, like Benny Goodman, had appeared, what would the majority rock audience of the time have thought of it? Well, probably the same as what the current mass of people think. Sheer Mag: “I don’t know them.” That doesn’t mean that a great band of any kind, be it swing or rock & roll, is a great band, but of course, even if it is clearly out of time.
That being said, you can do classic rock & roll and sound ridiculous or outdated or you can do classic rock & roll and sound as good as Sheer Mag does on their first album for their new label, none other than Third Man. Records, Jack White’s record label. This “Playing Favorites” sticks to the usual formula, great riffs and licks by Kyle Seely and the brutal voice of the volcanic Tina Halladay, somewhere between Thin Lizzy, the Sonics and the first Cheap Trick, although here they expand the limits a little of their sound, adding a bit of disco funk and some more pop songs.
Supposedly this “Playing Favorites” It was initially going to be a disco EP that the band wrote to try to get out of their personal problems by writing the most euphoric music possible. It’s easy to see which songs were intended for that EP, it’s all about the playful “All Lined Up”, “Mechanical Garden”the most evident in its intentions to immerse itself in Studio 54, and the best of the lot, the spectacular “Moonstruck” which answers the question of what The Jackson 5 would sound like if they were a rock band.
Their most pop songs also stand out, in which they show that they have improved a lot melodically, I’m talking about things like “Don’t Come Lookin”, “Golden Hour” or that ending with “When We get Back”, in which there are even vocal harmonies, of course, at no time do they lose their bite and punch, sounding as lo-fi as in their beginnings.
But the best comes again with their rock hits that cannot have a better example than that initial double blow composed of the vibrant title song and that blaze titled, so stupidly and so rock & roll, “Eat It And Beat It”. Can you make great rock & roll in 2024? It is enough to listen to these guys unleashed in that song to shout a clear as obvious: Yes, we can! (Another very different thing is whether they are going to get someone who is no longer a practitioner of this religion to become a new convert…).
Playing Favorites de SHEER MAG