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"... a great handle on smart rock music that's informed by a raft of '60s artists - Time Out NY
The band’s Babylon EP is available on May 1 at reeltoreelrecords.com, as well as all major download sites. The EP is the first in a series of EPs the New York City sextet will release in 2007.
"Babylon" liner notes. Courtesy of Drew Cucuzza
Chuck D famously called rap the black CNN, but he was only stating the obvious. Rap was inherently folk music, and folk, blues and "hillbilly" music have always been the CNN, or Brooklyn Eagle or John Cameron Swayze for the disenfranchised. The Treniers sound risqué today singing about "Hadacol" and "Poontang" but had they only been born a generation earlier Alan Lomax would have tossed the Revox in the trunk and driven a thousand miles to document a holler like "Poontang".
Document is what the Royal Wylds do, setting them apart from their contemporaries. Where popular music once chronicled the world the artists lived in, it's all escapism, engineered passion or ironic detachment these days. The "Songs You Hear in Bars" never give a clue as to why you might find yourself in that bar in the first place. They're the bloomin' onion with a beat, consumed and forgotten.
The Royal Wylds will not be forgotten, nor will the world they observe.
In "Swing Yr Lantern" the times change back and the wind blows in another direction. One if by land, two if by sea, but no single soul has enough limbs when it's "by executive-in-chief".
"Spraypaint Jackhammer Claw" sees John Henry scattered into a legion of migrant workers, but with no steam engine battle to immortalize them, just pick up work. "Kimbo" battles at the crossroads where the Dixie Cups and the Shangri-Las meet the Famous Flames and a hundred years from now he'll be as "real" as Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan, but with video to prove the myth and distort the truth.
"From Seat 9" is a murder ballad for the era of the superstar criminal, an internet sensation and docudrama ready. Sometimes you're better off not knowing what makes people tick and some answers aren't answers at all.
"Songs You Hear in Bars" should be just that, a soundtrack to gin therapy.
The title of "Johnny Cash Died of a Broken Heart" comes from graffiti seen in the Wylds Williamsburg neighborhood, but it's just stating what we all knew. There's more truth in that title than in the whole of "I Walk the Line".
Johnny Cash sang every type of American music but always sounded like Johnny Cash. He would have loved the Wylds.
I think you will too.
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