They touch every now and again on late ’60s psychedelic garage pop, but at their core, there’s very little about The Ribeye Brothers that one could classify in one way or another as nonsense. Not no-nonsense, no-frills, but very few. On their fourth album, Call of the Scrapheap — released this year on Main Man Records — the Jersey-based five-piece prove heavy on wit and self-deprecation and light on flourish. That’s not to insinuate the 14 tracks on the 40-minute album, all but five of which clock in under three minutes, are somehow lacking, just that they’re efficient in a classic pop sense. Verses lead to strong choruses, organs complement guitars, and vocalist Tim Cronin and guitarist Jon Kleiman lead the band through good-time misery that makes as much use of Cronin‘s lyrical wit as any other element, the earliest cuts “Apples, Plums and Pears” and “Come in Last” setting the tone for the mood that the rest of the album follows through.

That mood? Filled with dry sarcasm, pointed self-critique and sometimes hilarious turns of phrase. “Apples, Plums and Pears” offers a straightforward hook in, “It’s cloudy all the time/The sun it never shines,” but “Coward’s Way” turns cliche on its head with “Some say it’s the coward’s way/I say cowards stay/I say cowards stay too long,” and “Good as New” asserts that “My good as new/Is neither good nor new.” Cronin‘s voice is perfectly suited to delivering these lines, he keeps a tongue-in-cheek feel that neither undercuts the sincerity in what he’s saying nor makes Call of the Scrapheap too wallowing. In addition, the upbeat rocking vibes of “Come in Last” and buzzsaw fuzz of “Smart Like Aristotle” provide an endearing contrast to the negativity of prose, giving The Ribeye Brothers a more complex vibe than they’d have if all the tracks were as much downers musically as they seem on the surface to be lyrically. Even as Cronin asserts that it’s cloudy all the time, the music behind him — provided by Kleiman, guitarist Brent Sisk, bassist Joe Calandra and drummer Neil O’Brien (who also did the album cover) — is as sunny as one could ask it to be.

Read more »