Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Album review: Riverboat Gamblers - Underneath the Owl

By Staff of The Gobblers Knob

Austin, TX by way of Denton, TX rockers Riverboat Gamblers have built a reputation for being raucous performers who don’t mind bleeding a little during their frenetic live-set. The spirit of their live-performance ways are captured brilliantly in their new record, Underneath the Owl (Volcom). The band will be spending a great deal of time touring with the likes of Rancid and Rise Against over the course of the next few months. The pairing with punk-greats (o.k., just one punk great) makes complete sense as the album boils down an assortment of hard sounds and pours them into a mold that creates an album that spits, swaggers, bleeds and breathes some toxic life into the benign world of punk.

I wouldn’t call Underneath the Owl a typical, straight forward punk record. While there are sonics that recall the works of SoCal punks Goldfinger and Social D (”Alexandria”, “Keep Me from Drinking” “Pilgrims in an Unholy Land” and the song that gets my vote for best song title of the year, ”Robots May Break Your Heart”), there are also tracks that bring to mind the work of some home-state forerunners. The opening track, “Dissdissdisskisskisskiss” takes me back to the first time I heard At the Drive In’s “One-Armed Scissor” and “Catastrophe” roars like a menacing Toadies track with a swig or two of Red Bull.

The screaming guitars and the rushed call-and-response on many of the choruses give the album a sense of urgency that compels the listener to sit-tight and shut-up. Often during the course of the album, the lead vocals, which are shared by different members of the band, go from soaring to guttural growls effectively and instantaneously. Numbers such as “Sleepless”, a more straight-forward rock track, contain a polished crunchiness that many mall-punk/pop acts would likely trade their Vans shoes in for, if they could recreate it for their own album. Perhaps the key element that will easily set Underneath the Owl apart from the line of punk albums released this year is the strong sense of melody, regardless of the influence from track to track, that isn’t apparent in most punk releases.

Download a free track from Underneath The Owl and listen to songs on Riverboat Gamblers MySpace.

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