Typical. The music industry spends the best part of four decades seeking out ways to record the crispest, clearest sound. The research is exhaustive; the technology polished and perfected; the gizmos and gadgetry ever more intricate. How, then, can it not be technological blasphemy for a ramshackle bunch of teenagers from Chicago to come along and record a great album on outdated equipment in a basement?
Thus are Smith Westerns; four lo-fi garage-rockers whose jangling, disjointed sound has already signed them to small-time scourers of the Illinois underground scene, HoZac Records. A band that embraces, nay, exploits the ‘unwanted’ scuzz and noise, and hurls in a jumble of rusty ‘60s rock-and-roll influences and fraying glam-rock inspiration.
The eponymous first album kicks off with the fuzzy ‘Dreams’, a clanging, sing-along number oozing adolescent desire, and the laddish ‘Boys Are Fine’, characterised by nigh-on indecipherable lyrics and a wailing, testosterone-fuelled chorus. From there, the album progresses to ‘Gimme Some Time’, which sounds like the Velvet Underground performing in a phone-box; this whirlwinds into ‘Girl In Love’, the insistent drumming and sparse guitar work of which evokes T. Rex’s ‘Bang A Gong’.
The sixth track is surely the standout, ‘Tonight’. Like most other Smith Westerns songs, it sounds like it’s played from inside a vat of crude oil, and behind the practically inaudible lyrics lies a thrusting but tuneful guitar riff and forceful drumming. On ‘The Glam Goddess’, lead singer Cullen Omori’s voice resonates with molasses-sweet, youthful yearning, and the record concludes with the similarly-themed clamour of ‘My Heart’.
Smith Westerns’ clattering, blaring din is bringing back some tarnished glitz and glamour to the rock and roll scene. Rarely do you hear a new band with such an idiosyncratic, primitive and deliberately blemished sound, and seldom have I related so much to an act on first listen. Smith Westerns juxtapose the unsolicited and pervasive with the charming and addictive, and the result is an album of abrasive, coarse beauty.
