We don't care about your good times

The Turpentine Brothers are doing what The White Stripes can only dream about – creating loud, nasty, greasy garage rock in the spirit of the originators of the genre, and without the half-assed art school pretensions of Jack White. There are a few superficial similarities between the Bros and the Stripes: both work without a bass player, and both have a female drummer. Oh, and the fake-sibling thing, too. There are some mighty big differences, though. Tara McManus can actually keep time, for one thing.  And how! She pummels, pounds and generally kicks percussion ass. Nothing too subtle, but then again subtlety is not called for. This is crushing rock & roll we’re talking about, not the Junior League’s annual flute concerto. Bash it out and move on is the name of the game. And she does, with aplomb.

Also, Justin Hubbard can sing without sounding like an asthmatic stoat. That’s a big step up right there. His vocals contain the requisite amounts of snotty aggression and slurred consonants. (I’m pretty sure he’s pissed off about something on “Somethin’s Not Right”, but I’m not sure exactly what it might be.) And let’s not overlook his appropriately down-and-dirty guitar playing; the tone he achieves on the instrumental “Wrong Night” is one I haven’t heard on too many records made after 1966. This is a very good thing.

And then there’s the band’s secret weapon, the element that puts them head and shoulders above the vast majority of combos plowing the same field – namely, the wicked keyboard stylings of one Zack Brines. Oh my goodness, what a difference a little Wurlitzer makes! The left-hand keyboard bass fills out the bottom end magnificently, leaving Hubbard free to focus on six-string freak-outs and trashy chording, while the right hand makes with the swirling counterpoints and carnival/roller rink solos. It’s everything that worked about Ray Manzarek’s sound, only scaled back a bit and without Morrison spewing ostentatious, dime-store Freudian/literary eyewash all over the top of everything. Yay!

Plus, they’ve got the very good taste to cover the likes of Curtis Mayfield (“Fool For You”), Charles Brown (“I Wanna Be Close”), and the Holland – Dozier – Holland composed “Love’s Gone Bad”. A lot of neo-garage bands fall into the trap of forgetting about the R&B lust of the original garagistas and sticking solely with the British Invasion sound – which was itself derived from R&B. They end up with a watered-down, pale imitation of what it’s really all about.

Which, in case you’ve forgotten, is loud, fun music. Yeah, the world can be a fucked-up place, to be sure. But rather than wallowing in it a la the relentless mopery of, say, Radiohead (seriously, will somebody just get Thom Yorke some lithium already?), The Turpentine Brothers recognize that fact and then proceed to dance all over it, per the famous Pete Townshend dictum. They’re life-affirming, in a way that Hallmark will never understand. If listening to The White Stripes is the equivalent of driving daddy’s BMW from the frat house down to TGI McFuckwits to drink on your parents’ Visa card and listen to some ersatz, animatronic “band” drag the term “blues rock” through the mud for the umpteenth time, (and I submit that if it’s not, then it’s not far off), then giving We Don’t Care About Your Good Times a spin is like walking through your vaguely-sketchy- but-basically-working-class neighbor hood to the local dive, where the jukebox is hot, the bartender is cool, and the bands they book in on Saturday nights know what they’re up to, they get it, and it’s hot and smokey and sweaty and your job might suck and you might not have gotten laid in what seems like forever but right now the band is tight and that cute chick/dude (choose the appropriate gender) across the room is definitely giving you the eye and goddamn but it’s good to be alive.

The Turpentine Brothers may claim that they don’t care about our good times, but if that were really the case they wouldn’t be making such fine music. If you care about rock & roll at all, you owe it to yourself to go out and hunt this album down.