Short Porch Hot & Ready cassette
By-the-numbers rock’n’roll from Brooklyn, NY. Well, at least on the A-side. The songs are catchy enough, the recording is very pro, and the musicianship is solid, but this is essentially Americana rock en général. Particularly “Not Enough Lovin,” which sounds like a band whose biggest aspiration was opening for BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN in the ’80s. Flip the tape over, and things get faster and grittier, with more of a noise-rock-inspired take on garage punk. It almost feels like they discovered LOST SOUNDS and decided they wanted to be nasty for a while. Taken as a whole, the tape gives me the impression of a band dipping their toes into different flavors of rock’n’roll in the hopes that one of them might stick. The one thing that remains consistent from side to side is the singer’s heavily digitally processed vocal warble, which doesn’t sound cool or Jello-esque, it just sounds phony and distracting.