Thursday, September 15, 2011
Rock Review: Neon Love Life, 'Tuesday Night'
Posted by Marc D. Allan on Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 8:45 AM
Tuesday Night
Roaring Colonel
Four stars
“I’ll take you where you wanna go,” Neon Love Life promises on “Grounded,” the third track on the band’s impressive debut disc. And these four women absolutely deliver on that boast: Tuesday Night is a full-throttle, no-nonsense collection of seriously fun and fearsome punk with a pop edge that’ll remind you at various times of The Pretenders’ riffs and Patti Smith’s howl.
Really, though, this disc is a celebration of rock ‘n’ roll, a windows-open, crank-the-volume, sing-at-the-top-of-our-lungs joyride that begins with Tasha Blackman’s propulsive drumming and ends with Blackman leading a raved-up cover of The Cramps’ “Teenage Werewolf” that’s as campy as it is energizing.
Hear:Tuesday Night (via Bandcamp):
In between, Lindsay Manfredi sings of loves gone wrong (the superb title track) and sometimes right (“Love Control”), and about how music can make you feel better when everything else is going wrong (“Clark Street”). And guitarist Ashley Plummer and bassist Sharon Rickson provide tuneful muscle — just listen to them race around on “A.M. Sun” and “Indiana.”
The disc has its ragged moments — both “Whiskey” and “Love Control” could have used a fuller sound during the verses, and the 4½-minute “Lovers Lie” feels long and overblown. (“Ghost,” which is almost five minutes, has a seductively creepy feel, so its length is never an issue.)
But overwhelmingly, this is a stellar effort.
The members of Neon Love Life are also the local organizers of Girls Rock, where they teach pre-teen and teenage girls how to write and play their own music. In the future, Tuesday Night can serve as their teaching manual.
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