Pittsburgh's
Dirty Faces
like to describe their music as "rickety
rock
," but that label doesn't quite stick when you listen to their second album,
Get Right with God
. These songs are the sonic equivalent of an old house covered with peeling paint and shingles falling from the roof, but once you get inside and stomp the floorboards a few times, you realize the place is a lot more solid than it looks. Like that house,
have built this disc from time-tested materials -- dirty
blues
, hillbilly
soul
, stripped-down
hard rock
, and the kind of
punk
that's been around for a few decades and isn't going anywhere. Put all that together with some tenpenny nails and you have
: vocalist
T. Glitter
howling like
Greg Dulli
on 20 cups of coffee,
Leadfoot Powers
and
Easy "Tweekit" Powers
lashing out thick and muscular guitar figures,
Tricky Powers
sinking ominous subsonic basslines under it all,
Bloody H. Powers
adding some rough but satisfying keyboard textures, and
Sweet Willie "Five Fingers" Powers
behind the drums, driving like a Peterbilt on the fast numbers and trotting slow but steady when the tempos wind down.
is messed-up
rock & roll
American style, ragged but right, and while their wall of shambling noise might make you think this is music ready to fall apart, let the grooves sink in and you'll know
can withstand a Category Five hurricane when they start to play. ~ Mark Deming