Ride The Boogie
Ride The Boogie
Longhair Illuminati Recordings
By Jose Fritz
A boogie is a simple guitar structure: the B and C are played by stretching the fourth finger from the A2 and A3 frets up to B and C on the same string. All true boogie patterns are played with a swing or shuffle rhythm. In the early part of the century the term ‘boogie’ meant rent-party. It’s an ancient American tradition of musicians passing the hat at house parties events to pay the rent.
The idea started a hundred years ago and appears regularly in the cannon: Gene Krupa’s “Thanks for the Boogie Ride”, John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Man,” “Boogie Ride” by Hucklebuck Williams was recorded in 1946… it seems to go back to the dawn of recorded time. But there are no boogies on this record. They are seeking the idea of boogie.
Maybe it was his time in Vaux that made Tymn want to write something a little less trendy. Perhaps it was the time Pinson spent in the tortuously bad Places to Park that drove him to seek out absolution. But Ride to Boogie sounds nothing like either of their previous Volcom outings. Not names, themes, sounds, or the internalized sensations of artistic failure. Nothing.
The vocals are intermittently flat, the strain and crack, but the sensations are real. Every song had this visceral, cathartic quality. The songs reek of rock n’ roll escapism and wonderment, with plot lines like 1980s action movies. In the song “Hop Along Chastity” they describe a faux robbery and describe the getaway in detail. (The song bears no relation to the 1940s cabaret song of the same title.)
We have one minute left before we’re blown to pieces
Caught dead or alive and never having a home
If we can catch the plane before it leaves the runway
We’ll be set for life and we will never go home.
Some of these songs are burdened by a reliance on a thick and chunky meat soup of fuzz bass. These cuts resemble the Hank Williams III side project Assjack. While that was an interesting dalliance for him, it’s a distraction here. There are a couple of these that mix well in the context of the album but betray a weak connection to southern rock. I don’t hear it at all in the more intelligent songs. I somewhat suspect what I’m hearing is the differing song writing of two writers: drummer Glenn Pinson and guitarist Adam Tymn.
Denver, once a cow town itself, has long undeservedly held onto the image of being a frontier town. Most Texans are raised from both to vacation there but to always feel superior to the Coloradan. Then this frontier was electrified and began it’s descent into the depraved high-rent air-conditioned hippie-haven it is today. Ride the Boogie tries to redeem them.
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