Tora! Tora! Torrance! - A Cynics Nightmare
Tora! Tora! Torrance! are far from being front runners of the recent rock resuscitation smorgasbord, but they deserve credit for being sharp in a mostly restrained, settled environment.
“We don’t read the books we write them / With diamond rings / And new lives in the closet / Overdoses, fake deaths / Rehabs in California”
When such highfalutin prose pervades your lyrical grit, there had better be equal, if not pertinent musical validity that justifies this holier-than-thou, snarky attitude. Yet as you progress through A Cynics Nightmare, you are struck more by Tora! Tora! Torrance!’s keen observational capacity rather than the more pretentious nodes that seemingly mars other showy rock bands. And while Nick Koenigs’ voice is trapped somewhere mid spectrum between Julian Casablancas’ nasal flustering and Paul Banks’ darker, monodroned brooding, his emphatic rock wailing fits the glorious garage/noise/punk n’ roll that so savagely reverberates here. If the previously stated lyrical sampling were any more apparent, the striking mélange of guitar toying and pulsating percussions found on “Another Drink to Yr Health” could very well go unnoticed. But this frenzied, almost spastic structural territory is hard to pass up on – derived from what seems to be the exigency for musical assertion and finesse; a combination the band excitably renders well on this effort.
Perhaps the band owes some gratitude to the recent deluge of more garage-influenced, noisy rock affairs; they certainly have emerged in opportune times. In spite of New York’s gargantuan stranglehold on the current gathering of critically acclaimed, much publicized garage/punk bands, Tora! Tora! Torrance! are but a stones throw away in terms of artistic and tuneful abandon. Add to that their certain youthful exuberance and impressive interpretations, and you have a molded rock aesthetic that plays very nicely. Case in point, their slightly humorous but no less truthful account of today’s seemingly misdirected punk scene; in “I Though I Was At a Punk Show”, they adeptly croon over the brash hard rock static, “and at such a young age / and with such a young face / don’t tell me you are that cynical”. A clever jab at what appears to be the lacking trust and school boy attitude that permeates much of today’s punk underground.
The scrupulously lo-fi, somewhat experimental wash of “Bury the Hatchet in Yr Chest” is perhaps one of the flaws found on this release. Something about the murky, grungy bass filling that acts in tedium, a hazed exuberance that lacks bearing and cause. As the backbone wavering fades in on the following “A Cynic’s Nightmare”, it once again reinforces the point that while lyrically proficient, Tora! Tora! Torrance! still boasts some musical weaknesses; this time being the unhurried, peculiar musical wrangling that props Koenigs’ bursting voice. One he uses to denounce love’s less spiritual, bawdier approach that so clearly disseminates in these times of looser moral value; “what happened to the luv song? / I said what happened to the luv? / it’s just the fluid exchange game”, it is by far the song’s more significant quality, the plea of true love rather than lustful thirst, “and I wanna say ‘I luv you’ not only to those hills and valleys”.
While the band never once relies on cheaply constructed melodies, there is nonetheless a feeling of unidentified polish. Never too experimental, not quite avant-garde but not overly harmonious; songs like the essential “Dr Badd” with its well paced choral buzzing and guitar charming replace more tendered mannerisms with engaging, but accessible jagged rock components. And while musically they tread on middle ground between The Hives and garage/punk bands of yore (The Stooges, MC5) with discernibly more mod-punk processes, this none-to-clear straddling of wildly serrated yet noticeably current facets separates these Minneapolis natives from their Big Apple and Scandinavian counterparts.
It is this certain moderate quality that will likely endear them more to suburbanites craving a piece of revivalist rock rather than those more urbane types – an appetizing dose to ears not normally trained for such vitality. Tora! Tora! Torrance! are far from being front runners of the recent rock resuscitation smorgasbord, but they deserve credit for being sharp in a mostly restrained, settled environment.
(The Militia Group)