The Independents - Into The Light (2014) RESTORED

Formed in early 1992 by Evil Presly and Willy B, The Independents was born out of the frustration of music being stereotyped and just plain boring. The guys loved all types of music, from Conway Twitty to Iron Maiden, from the Ramones to Etta James and The Specials. Both loved horror and sci-fi movies and wanted to find some way to include it in their music. As result, they are mixes horror themes and rockabilly into the 1990s Punk mix. Into The Light is their new studio album. Recommended if you like the Damned, Misfits and Ramones.

With "Into the Light," garage rockers The Independents cover a large swathe of musical territory, and pretty much manage to raze all of it. This is a gritty, hard-rocking album, but it's also one that keeps the listener guessing … which is a pretty neat trick when most of the sounds are stripped down to the bone.

The Independents — a South Carolina-based band that's recently toured through New England, including a show last night in Worcester at the Lucky Dog Music Hall — have a talent for switching up tones between two songs. "Into the Light" leads off with a whiskey-fueled barn-burner, "Rise," that's driven by sidewinder Southern-rock guitars and no small amount of braggadocio. It's a muscular bit of rock 'n' roll, which is why it makes it so surprising when, on the very next song, the band trades in that force for the melodic indie rock sound of "Corpses in the Rain."

A title like that projects a hard-core vibe, a sense that what's about to happen is a rain of jackhammers and screams, what we get instead are clean, vibrant vocals and brightly shimmering instrumentation.

The pivot from backwoods barroom to contemporary college radio is in some ways a bewildering choice, but it tells the listener that this is a band that can't be easily pigeonholed, and demonstrates the musicians' range. But they're not just messing with the listener: That whetted appetite for something a little more raucous gets rewarded almost immediately with "Walk Away," which is effectively a pop punk song, with hard-core instrumentation and more melodic vocals.

The rattlebag song-style mix is effective, from a listener's perspective, although sometimes it sounds a bit like someone's iPod left on shuffle. Sometimes it's difficult to remember that this is all the same band, but when the civilized veneer is stripped away and the band is at its grittiest — as it is on "Sound of An Angel's Wings" and 'Black Angel" — it's easy to forgive any excesses or inconsistencies. Indeed, even considering the wild swings in style, there's enough underlying connectivity to reveal a cohesive album. Just as the lyrical quality of "Corpses in the Rain" bleeds over into the hard-edged "Walk Away," a good many of the threads that have preceded land on "I've Waited."

Another band might be tempted to tie things off there, creating a sense of synthesis at the end of the album, but The Independents instead use that sense of cohesion as a partition of sorts, dropping the vocal register, slowing the tempo and leaning heavier on the drums for "Legion of Doom." It's as if the album's mass has suddenly doubled. Everything becomes heavier, taking on a weight that the music seems to strain against, struggling to take flight. When the tempo picks up again on the next song, "Tsantsa Twist," it feels like an explosion set to the tune of distorted garage rock.

By the time we get to the breezily tenored, Ramones-flavored "Broken" and the old-school garage rocker "Baby Mine," we've found the album's parameters and can just spend some time rocking out. Which is terribly appreciated. The stretch from these songs into the over-the-top "So Depressing" just rocks in the most straightforward, unapologetic manner.

The tempo drop near the end of the album is curious – the ska-inflected "Never Let it Go" and the acoustic punk-doo-wop number "Until" are great, but also re-introduce the erratic tonal shifts heard earlier in the album. It's a coin flip as to whether that's going to work for a particular listener, but for the most part it's effective, especially as a lead-in to the album's title-song closer, "Into the Light," which has the thinnest, most spare sound on the album, as well as the cleanest, least fussy vocals. The rasp that chokes the lyrics as the song progresses gives the song an air of authenticity.

It's in that quiet sense of honesty that the album finds its soul: Both it and its musicians are capable of being anything, and have gone to great lengths to demonstrate this fact.

And that's the question this album, in all of its shape-shifting and wild transformations, seems to have been asking all along: What are these songs when everything is stripped away, when all you have left is a guitar and a voice?

The last song, in some ways, seems to be something glimmering faintly at the bottom of Pandora's music box, a tiny firefly wisp of hope when rock is drowning in ornamentation.

~ Review by Victor D. Infante

Tracklist:

01. Rise / listen samples
02. Corpses In The Rain
03. Walk Away
04. Sound Of An Angel's Wings
05. Black Angel
06. I've Waited
07. Legion Of Doom
08. Tsantsa Twist
09. Broken
10. Baby Mine
11. So Depressing
12. Never Let It Go
13. Until
14. Into The Light

all songs by Evil Presly & Willy B, except "4" by Harold B. Jenkins
and " 10" by Frank E. Churchill & Ned Washington


Produced by Brian McKenzie & The Independents. Engineered by Brian McKenzie & Will Harper
Recorded at Brian Lea McKenzie's Music Factory, Murtle Beach SC. and Maui SoCo Studio, Frorence, SC.
Mixed by Brian McKenzie & The Independents. Mastered by Brad Blackwood at Euphoric Masters.

• Evil Presly - lead vocals
• Willy B - guitars, bass, mandolin, sinthesizer, backing vocals
• John Hayes - drums

additional musicians:
+ Tattoo Slover - organ on "12 & 14"
+ Kerrine Gifford - cello on "13"

Release Date: March 17, 2014
Label: Suki Records
Catalog No.: Suki-10743


More 'The Independents'
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