Going down the road

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Girls gone wild

For the first single, "Liquid Cure (The Way Life Should Be)," they go the other way, laying on the punk and tearing out a big chorus: "All the boys are making passes/At the girls in the horn-rimmed glasses." The cover bands in this town are helping the bar patrons down bottles from the bottom shelf as the drums thunder and the vocals gang up on themselves. If I'd had my way, though, the single here would have been "Everybody's Got a Broken Heart," one last nod to Springsteen whose opening guitar peal sounds like it came right off Oasis's Heathen Chemistry. No song here better recalls the glory days of rock radio, with its guitar solos, 4/4 rhythm like a heartbeat, and lyrics that "take you back to when lovin' was fun."

It's a sentiment that echoes through the finish of the album, which comes after what is now the requisite slow song with an acoustic guitar to finish, "The Night You Stopped Coming Home." We've had rock and roll at this point, we've had sex aplenty, and now come the drugs; you "put it between your toes." So much of this album is familiar, and purists might complain they've heard some of these sounds before, if in different places and different arrangements. But it's fresh and raw in the right places, and it's a hell of a lot of fun.

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All the Real Girls are real like a crackling live wire writhing on a rain-soaked street, like a house on fire on a show-filled country night. Are these Girls beautiful, are they dangerous, or are you really hoping they're both?

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam_pfeifle@yahoo.com.

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