There are two main dangers to naming your band after a classic album: First, it’s confusing. Second, you risk comparisons to the album in question, and unless your album is also a classic (hint: it’s probably not), you’re screwed.

This situation has cropped up twice in the past year, with bands called the Big Pink and the Gilded Palace of Sin. Listen, Dammit, contributor Kenneth Partridge loved Big Pink’s record, and “Music from Big Pink” by the Band is just stunning.

The Flying Burrito Brothers record that yielded the name of the Gilded Palace of Sin is another touchstone album. The namesake trio of Mancunians doesn’t quite rise to classic status on its debut, “You Break Our Hearts, We’ll Tear Yours Out” (Central Control), but the group shows powerful potential.

These 10 songs have little in common with the Burritos’ hippie cowboy sound. They’re darker, for one thing, with a desolate air in the booming bone-dry percussion and deep, seething guitar parts.

Singer Pete Phythian frequently sounds as if he’s handing down prophesies of doom, straining with passion against the confines of a distant, grinding guitar on ”Rosa Salvaje,” and flatly intoning over noirish instrumental wanderings on “There is No Evil, There Is No Good.”

The effect throughout plays like the house band in a dusty ghost-town saloon, biding its time as it waits expectantly for heaven knows what.

— Text by Eric R. Danton, photo by Brett Walker

January 19, 2010 at 8:30 am | Share |