So, you’ve never heard the Rock*A*Teens? Now, why is that? Surely, it’s not because they shamelessly pilfered their name from the 50’s beat combo whose “Woo Hoo” has soundtracked a million commericals? Or because they were the only male-fronted reverb-overdosed rockers on Indigo Girl Amy Ray’s Daemon Records? Or the messed-up punctuation that probably made it hard for your local record store to even order it in the first place? Well, rectify that and dig into this Southern-gothic-noir gem.
Led by Chris Lopez, who went on to form the equally obscure Tenement Halls, the R*A*Ts are intense. The music alternates between driving and langorous – and the hard-luck subjects of the songs are so richly realized that you find yourself hoping that these are fiction and not auto-biography.
I’d always been fond of “Cherry Red Compilation” – a grimly nostalgic ode to mixtapes and lost loves – and this piledriver still holds up. But for some reason, I’d written off the album as a whole and let Cherry Red live on as a fragment of a mix (how novel!) So 14 years later, I discovered a raft of great songs that simultaneously celebrate and curse the life of a loser. “I Am Forgetting” is a brilliant rave-up. “Losers, Weepers” is a smoldering hanger-on. But “Black Ice” is the true epic. A tale of a crazed drive home – or maybe a Dixie death trip – dripping with gritty Carver/Bukowski-ish lyrics and sung with such a passion that if you aren’t feeling it by the first chorus, you may already be dead.
"Black Ice" is featured with a bunch of resurrected oddballs on my 2011 Rediscoveries Spotify playlist.
Fun facts: This album, along with the first R*A*Ts record, features an almost-inaudible Kelly Hogan. (I’m pretty sure that’s why I bought this is the first place – and probably why I shelved it, since I couldn’t hear one of my favorite singers.) And they ended up on the Rudy and Go-Go cartoon show’s compilation album. Vote Goat!.
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