Reigning Sound:
Love and Curses

Reigning Sound

Label: In the Red Records






Memphis is Jerusalem for American music; a city populated with holy shrines like Stax Records, Graceland, Beale Street and Sun Studios needs no new religions, only new generations. Greg Cartwright, to his credit, can lay claim to creating both. He did so first under the pseudonym Jack Oblivion for punk garage revivalists The Oblivions, then under his own name for the epic Reigning Sound, expanding on the Oblivions' smack-in-the-face sound to comprise a wider range of R&B and Soul friction. Before I knew much about Cartwright's pedigree, I loved Time Bomb High School, a record that hit close to home for a 17 year-old unsure in his own skin. The way his throaty croon and marvelous howl spoke to teenage alienation and the problem of caring too much shook with an adolescent rage, underscored by sad pop ballads.

So, I needed to spend a while with Love and Curses, which is not only a follow-up to Time Bomb High School, but also the first Reigning Sound record in seven years to the month. That's a long enough time to be somewhat afraid you've grown apart from a band that seemed to once have the same blood coursing through its veins as yourself. Rock music isn't about purity though. It's about getting messy and watching that blood spill. Oh, boy does it spill. Halfway through "Stick Up For Me," where Cartwright reacts to the government keeping working people at war or in debt, I wanted to throw my desk towards the opposite wall, though it wasn't that same youthful anger of seven years ago that propelled me.

This new rage was brought on by the slow grind of adulthood and the feeling that you're fated to fail the harder you struggle. It always scares me when the band doesn't rage so much as nervously run through songs of betrayal as on "Is it True?" and "The Bells." The expectation that the music will gun down its unjust targets the same way the band has done in the past lingers, yet the approach here is to gently back off from the idea of revenge. Hefty guitar solos and Hammond B3 organs still flow like the Tigris and Euphrates, but resign themselves to a lonely bitterness of the masochistic stalker on "Break It". It's not necessarily the surest route to rock catharsis, but it is an undeniably mature and fascinating progression for a band that takes a giddy thrill from the moments leading up to an inevitable collapse.

In Cartwright's songs, he never gets the girl. If he did, Reigning Sound would only be an awesome-sounding band that nails all the nuances of '60s guitar rock, substituting flab for punk rock curtness; a theoretical feast for vinyl fetishists, perhaps, but a shallow waste of an incredible sound. Their secret weapon is in the lyrics. Each line is perfectly timed and hits the right nerves- the exposed ones. Between the soul-shaking guitar parts of "Debris" is a jealous paranoia tearing the singer apart. The same rule applies on "Trash Talk," where "the truth is just as good as a lie." In Cartwright's world, desire is a heavy burden and the thin-skinned go up in flames. It is a marvelous fire though.

Though the band has kept their consistency in sound and poise, Love and Curses wasn't actually recorded in Memphis like their other releases. After a slew of technical difficulties, they traveled a little further north to Ashville, North Carolina, currently one of the country's hotbeds for guitar rock, as well as Cartwright's current residence. Nothing is lost of the Tennessee sound that brought them to the fore. Even Jerusalem needs to send out missionaries one in awhile.

by Neal Fersko