My Roaring 20s, the sophomore release from Lansing, MI's Cheap Girls was at first a little hard for me to pin down. It was Punknews that first brought them to my attention but they certainly aren't a punk band. They also don't really fit in the current (twee-ish) indie rock scene. Instead they're kind of throw-back indie rockers combining plaintively voiced songs of liquid excess and despair with musical grit and bombast borrowed from heavier genres. To me this echoes indie stalwarts the Weakerthans or even more impressive godfathers of the genre like Superchunk or The Replacements.These guys could be on the brink some well deserved success with this album. They have that universal appeal to a broader audience that you can see (certainly in a much larger degree) in the currently skyrocketing Gaslight Anthem. Every song on the album is head-nod and toe-tap inducing in the extreme. More than that they sound as if they'd be just as at home playing to a few bar-flies at a corner dive as headlining at an SXSW or a Bamboozle. I'm just saying that if these guys get a toe hold, don't be surprised to see them climb and climb quickly.
Every song on this album is catchy and you'll have the choruses to most down by the second listen. The themes are pretty easy to get into as well. These are tales of languishing in your small town, ('Modern Faces') with big dreams ('Ft. Lauderdale') watching your friends leave you behind ('All My Clean Friends') while you sit around and drink heavily (pretty much all of them). Even the last song on the album, 'One & Four,' is insanely catchy and could probably be a hit on commercial radio RIGHT NOW. 'Ft. Lauderdale' however, is the one I think they'll ride out of here. They think so too I'm assuming which is why they made it the single. Now often I think the single is literally the worst song on a given album (Senses Fail I'm looking at you. 'Buried a Lie' was terrible. Just terrible, but I digress) , but on this one they got it just right. This song is one tenacious sumbitch. Hear it once and you should probably just go buy the album because you're not going to stop singing it to yourself until you do. And on that note, the video:
Cheap Girls - "Ft. Lauderdale" from TCSG on Vimeo.
Cheap Girls - Ft. Lauderdale
Cheap Girls - All My Clean Friends
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Cheap Girls
