Not Nothing

Album review

If you like your rock & roll to come equipped with niceties like fidelity, tuning, and vocals that stay in pitch, you need to stop reading now. If you’re not picky about that stuff and just want wild & wanton excitement and sweaty good times, then you should turn to Xray Eyeballs and their debut album, Not Nothing. On it the band bash, slink, and clatter through a batch of songs that have the two things any good rock & roll song should have: loud guitars and big hooks. Add to that snotty, barely under control vocals, a healthy dose of sex, and loads of reverb. It’s a sound that’s been working since the days of Gene Vincent & the Blue Caps, and it works just fine for XRay Eyeballs. There’s just an extra layer of murk that would have horrified Vincent, though Jeffrey Lee Pierce would have totally understood. The album is spilt pretty evenly between songs like "Broken Beds" and "X-Ray Eyeballs Theme" that speed past in a lo-fi garage punk commotion, swampy almost-country ballads that have a creepy, dimly lit quality, and midtempo tracks with girl group-strong melodies ("Big Toe," in particular). It’s a mix that works like a charm and if they can find it, fans of scruffy, dirty, and not very nice rock & roll will take to Xray Eyeballs like squirrels to a birdfeeder.
© Tim Sendra /TiVo