(This review originally appeared in the February, 2006 issue of the San Diego Troubadour–www.sandiegotroubadour.com)

Truckee Brothers

It Came From The Speakers

by Simeon Flick

With their latest release, the Truckee Brothers have created an intelligently disaffected record that may very well put the sophisticated swank and swagger of the San Diego area music scene on the international indie-rock map once and for all.

The Truckee Brothers’ erudition and influences are revealed through clever wordplay (“Not a cad nor a gent/Just a day I'm on the fence/Same plain-Jane, chalkboard blank/Poster child for dissonance” from “I’m So…So-So”), swanky metropolitan innuendo (“Do you wanna play doctor/With what’s in your locker?” from “Billy Club”), impressionistic chord voicings (“Gin & Catatonic’s” lush changes are reminiscent of psychedelic 60’s folk-rock), smoothly integrated progressive time signatures (a grooving 7/4 time on “One Little Indian”), engaging indie-rock instrumentation (loud guitars, various keyboards and stringed instruments, etc.), and wink-and-smile, joke’s-on-you classic rock hat-tips, such as a full doff to CCR’s “Proud Mary” on “Becherovka” and a slew of song title name-checks on the title track (“It's More Than A Feeling/Hot Blooded Double Vision/Witchy Woman”).

The dual vocal attack of Cady and Peat Truckee (pseudonyms that invoke the Ramones’ spirit of group solidarity) are at the core of this quintessentially San Diegan offering. Although songs like “Billy Club” might make you wish (for a negligible minute) that only one of them was in charge, the constant harmonies are a breath of fresh air in that they contribute a new twist to the challenging act of balancing two distinct voices within a single band. Peat’s spry tenor (reminiscent of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke) contrasts nicely with Cady’s burly baritone (which answers the hypothetical what-would-it-sound-like-if-the-singer-from-Crash-Test-Dummies-was-hip question). The Truckees add another synergistic pairing to the annals of rock n’ roll; John Doe and Exene Cervenka (X), Ian McKaye and Guy Picciotto (FUGAZI), Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and now the Truckee Brothers.

The real stroke of genius here is how well the Truckees have managed to reconcile passé (?) classic rock influences with the dumbed-down approach of contemporary indie-rock. With this deft mixture of old and new, they could easily live up to the recent plea of Buddy Blue in the December issue of The Union Tribune: “Somebody please give this band a record deal so they can single-handedly save rock n’ roll from itself.”