Earl Greyhound open the floodgates
By WILL SPITZ | January 10, 2007
GRACE NOTES: Many bands have a similar game plan, but Earl Greyhound execute. |
At both shows Earl Greyhound have played in the Boston area to date — upstairs at the Middle East (to which they return this Tuesday) in early October and outdoors in Harvard Square for Oktoberfest a week later — people laughed. People laughed not because anything about the Brooklyn trio was particularly ha-ha funny but because they played with such brutal, precise power — guitarist Matt Whyte and bassist Kamara Thomas howling in perfect harmony, drummer Ricc Sheridan punishing his kit with the exactitude of a stopwatch — that it would’ve been hard not to have some sort of visceral reaction. At the Middle East, Drew Roach, an excellent local drummer who plays with the alt-country band Frank Smith, pointed at Sheridan, shouting, “Holy shit, it’s Buddy Miles! This guy is fucking amazing!” Before the last note of the set finished ringing out, he’d jumped on stage to shake Sheridan’s hand. In Harvard Square, among a crowd of bemused grandparent-looking folks and kids with balloon-animal hats, a middle-aged Dana Carvey look-alike jumped up and down and pounded his fists on the stage like a maniac throughout the band’s entire set, all the while laughing hysterically.Earl Greyhound aren’t reinventing the wheel with their music, a familiar take on ’70s guitar rock that’s one part T. Rex, one part Cheap Trick, and three parts Led Zeppelin. They do have charismatic stage presence. (The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones wrote, “Whether or not Earl Greyhound are the Next Big Thing is irrelevant — watching them will convince you that they are.”) But their real appeal lies in execution. As more people hear the band’s debut, Soft Targets (Some), comparisons with contemporaries mining similar musical terrain are inevitable. But what separates Earl Greyhound from, say, Wolfmother — the illogically popular Australian band who fancy themselves a present-day Zeppelin but come off more like Spinal Tap — is tunes. The songwriting and the arrangements on Soft Targets are expert; the band transition between parts with uncommon grace, and no note is wasted, even on the nearly nine-minute guitar jam “Monkey.” Memorable hooks abound, like the ascending guitar/vocal melody of “All Better Now,” on top of which Thomas sings a salient harmony, and the quick guitar leads that punctuate the harmonized vocal lines in the chorus of “Yeah I Love You.”
The roots of Earl Greyhound go back to 2002, when Whyte and Thomas were both cast in an MTV2 spot — a quick promo piece that ran before and after commercial breaks — by a mutual friend. Whyte, who grew up in Connecticut and went to college in California, had been living in New York since 1998 and was doing an “introspective acoustic-guitar kind of thing, like John Fahey, Nick Drake,” as he puts it when I sit down with him, Thomas, and Sheridan for Mexican food at Picante in Central Square. “I wanted to start a rock band. That’s why I came to New York. The music that I wanted to be playing was the music that I was listening to when I was like 11 or 12 years old. I was obsessed with Led Zeppelin when I was 11.”
Topics:
Music Features
, Entertainment, Music, Pop and Rock Music, More 
, Entertainment, Music, Pop and Rock Music, Singer Songwriters, Led Zeppelin, Spinal Tap, Cheap Trick, Alternative and Indie Rock, Dana Carvey, The Mars Volta, Less 
