Reigning Sound

407 Central Ave. NW,Albuquerque NM 87102

19 March, 2022

Description

Reigning Sound w/ Ex-Bats 21+ A night of jangle and swoon with Memphis indie prefects, Reigning Sound. Reigning Sound (Merge Records) The old saying “you can’t go home again” is most often true. Life moves on and nothing stays the same, but that’s certainly not the case for songwriter Greg Cartwright, who returned to his home city of Memphis to record the new Reigning Sound album, A Little More Time with Reigning Sound. It’s been over 15 years since Cartwright uprooted to Asheville, but this new Memphis-made record shows the songwriter in top form and wholly inspired by his birthplace. And it’s not only the terrain that’s familiar: For this new LP, Cartwright also reunited with Reigning Sound’s original “Memphis lineup” of Jeremy Scott (bass), Greg Roberson (drums), and Alex Greene (keyboards), all of whom played on the band’s earliest recordings. The new songs explore fresh lyrical and musical territories but at times also tastefully echo back to Reigning Sound’s Break Up, Break Down and Time Bomb High School. That’s not by chance—it’s just what happens when these musicians get in the same room. Their sonic chemistry hasn’t faded a bit. A Little More Time, Reigning Sound’s seventh proper full- length, is the original lineup’s first in-studio collaboration since 2005’s Home for Orphans LP, which Merge reissued last year. Ultimately, that 2020 reissue laid the groundwork for the outfit’s reunification. Ex Bats (Goner Records) On Now Where Were We, the Exbats hit the ground running like a dystopian garage rock version of the Shangri-Las, or like a message to the future from the pre-Velvet Underground doo-wop wannabe Lou Reed. The album rings bright, like a beacon in the wilderness: eminently, effortlessly catchy, and loaded with buoyant choruses that rank alongside the best chart-toppers launched by the Brill Building or Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. Kenny and his daughter, vocalist and drummer Inez McClain, formed the nucleus of the Exbats over a decade ago, when Inez was just 10 years old; today, Bobby Carlson rounds out the group on bass. Despite their remote location in Bisbee, Arizona, just 11 miles north of the U.S.-Mexican border, the group quickly racked up accolades citing a wealth of influences that run from cartoon quintet the Archies to punk rock originators the Avengers, and from the so-sweet-it-hurts 1910 Fruitgum Company to Los Angeles antiheroes the Weirdos. Truthfully, the Exbats embrace a wider swath of musical styles, incorporating blue-eyed soul, tongue-in-cheek country, Brit pop, psych, and R&B into their sound.