The Strange Boys: 'Be Brave'

This rustic group from Austin, Texas make music that combines the wiry, spasmodic energy of The Strokes and the sprawling intensity of The Band.

Garage rock very frequently draws on a kind of ultra-modern sensibility, with at least a nod towards minimalism, so it is refreshing and innovative to here a form of nostalgia at work. That is not to say that The Strange Boys are regressive, rather they incorporate country themes to echo a landscape in flux, scarred by the march of progress.

Their tools are traditional; a Wurlitzer organ, a dusting of acoustic guitar and Ryan Sambol’s keening, nasal voice, which emulates Dylan and Robbie Robertson in a stubborn reminder that the dirty pastoral is still an urgent aesthetic. The album is also a compact an energetic piece of work, the 12 tracks come in at just over half an hour, leaving the impression of having digested a series of folky wisdoms.

The album’s opening statement, 'I See', is a warm rolling thing that draws a veritable wall of sounds out of what might very well be a nine piece group playing in a small room. It is a generous and energetic start that reels with drunken glee. 'A Walk On The Bleach' is a bitter nod towards romance that quickly goes in a similar direction, only this time the rollicking sound is angrier, picking up speed with a hammering off the guitars and a running electric line.

The band’s garage sensibility emerges on the funky title track that sees Sambol screeching alongside a deranged chorus of yelpers who could be from a dark incarnation of Sesame Street. It is where the group sounds least like anyone else. Subsequent numbers, 'Friday In Paris', 'Da Da' and 'Night Might' would all sound perfectly at home on Dylan And The Band’s 'Basement Tapes'. These are intensely enjoyable songs, perfectly at home amongst the bearded revivalism currently contemporary, but ever bearing the weight of influence.

Such a group runs a greater risk than some of drifting towards cliché, and this happens on the extremely low-fi 'The Unsent Letter', which endeavours to sound like it is recorded in a bare room on a decrepit tape recorder, with a hangover. Here Sambol’s croaking voice sounds pained but put on.

'Laugh At Sex', 'Not Her' and the closing track 'You Can’t Only Love When You Want' are this group at their most original. The former is a brooding kind of menace that barely leaps out of its own skin to shake the listener. The latter is a gentle acoustic piece that dots around a two stringed melody. “I’m sure she was an angel; I’ve seen one before” croaks Sambol in a bleary eyed ballad that seems to be the still centre at the heart of an album full of carnal revelry.



Released on 22nd February 2010 by Rough Trade.

Written by Huw Green.