(Goner)

www.goner-records.com/

Back in the mid-1990s, before anyone had heard of the White Stripes or the Black Keys or any of the other millennial blues garage combos, Jack Yarber and bandmates Greg Cartwright and Eric Friedl were already fusing southern soul and R&B with rough-edged rock ‘n' roll as the Oblivians. (Coincidentally, The Gories, and later the Dirtbombs, were up north doing the very same thing with Motown soul.) The Oblivians, and to a lesser extent Yarber's other band with Cartwright, the Compulsive Gamblers, defined a certain kind of diesel-fumed, sweat-soaked Southern garage rock. Though neither band really hit the mainstream, they inspired tons of followers and even now their influence reverberates. The principals are still busy, too, Cartwright with the Reigning Sound, Friedl with the genre-defining Goner Records and Yarber with about half a dozen projects, including Jack-O and the Tennessee Tearjerkers.

This is the fourth Tearjerkers full-length, recorded in Memphis with a core five piece band - Yarber singing and playing guitar, John Paul Keith of the One Four Fives on lead, Adam "Bomb" Woodward on organ and other keyboards, Memphis eccentric Harlan T. Bobo on bass and CoCoComa's Bill Roe on drums. Afghan Whigs' Paul Buchignani sits in on drums for one song ("Let Me Go") and John Whittemore (like Keith, a One Four Five) takes lead guitar on "Against the Wall".

The band is great, fiery and razor sharp, the writing evocative and sure. Rockers like "Against the Wall" and "Stop Stalling" kick hard at the walls, while ballads like "Homesick Blues" stretch out in leisurely country laments. "Blood Bank Blues, maybe the best tune on the album, is a Grinderman-ish hallucination, a-swirl with vox solo and side-slanting blues licks, paced by Latin syncopations of woodblock and scratched percussion. It's completely different from everything else on the album - but then, you could say that about almost every tune, from the scrubbed, staccato romanticism of "Sweet Thang" to the early Springsteen swagger of "Crook for Your Look." 

If you laid this album side by side with, say, fellow Oblivian Cartwright's recent Live at Goner Records, it would be hard to say which was better...but not so hard to tell the difference. Yarber slips more than a bit of classic rock into these tunes - you'll pick up little nods to the Stones, the Yardbirds and Dylan here, as well as hints of Springsteen and Tom Petty.  It's less stripped-down than the Reigning Sound and maybe less pure.  Still, you could hardly ask for a better Saturday night record - and anyway, when was rock and roll ever expected to be pure? 

Standout Tracks: "Blood Bank Blues" "Stop Stalling" "Against the Wall" JENNIFER KELLY