Frankie Lee
This week’s new music round-up features wistful americana pop with a certain something special, foreboding doom-psych and skinhead London oi! punk, words as ever by Getintothis’ Patrick Clarke.
Where Do We Belong, the debut single from Mississippi-born nomad Frankie Lee, has something special about it; what was once known as an X factor before Cowell and co. irreparably ruined the term.
Built upon the same never-stationary foundations of the Springsteen-headed lineage of that certain breed of American great, the song strikes a crucial tone between a hazy, almost regretful yearn and a hinted sonic kinship with the most refreshing of Lee‘s contemporaries from The War on Drugs to Mac Demarco.
Backed by wayfaring yarns of cross-American ramblings from country farms to motels, drug addiction, narcolepsy and the loss of his father aged 12, with The Replacements‘ Slim Dunlap, Curtiss A and Townes Van Zandt‘s son JT (for whom he built cabinets for 6 years, naturally) playing the supporting roles, he cuts an intriguing figure both on record and in background, and in the earliest of starts is all but set to tell the tale.
Doom-rockers Sewer Rats, meanwhile, are anything but wistful. Discovered by London’s Fluffer Records in ‘a disused Grimsby fish market’ (where else?), their new EP Moneymaker, is bludgeoningly compact; apocalyptic descents of overdriven stoner-rock guitars avalanching into head-crushingly heavy hard-psych grooves reminiscent of Rocket Recordings legends The Heads at their most visceral.
London oi! punk oufit Crown Court, finally, are an equally uncompromising assault of a listen, yet in different style. Skinheads they may be, yet the foursome are nothing like throwbacks and the hammering clobber of latest tracks We Made You and Jack Jones are essential in their frenzied careens; the sound of 21st century punk at its bombarding best.
