The Wynona Riders – J.D. Salinger – Review

The Wynona Riders

J.D. Salinger (Lookout!)
by Sheril Stanford

Ya gotta love a band that calls itself The Wynona Riders and devotes a full two pages of the liner notes, in very dense text, with footnotes, to telling you why the band’s name has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with the well-known actress of (approximately) the same name. The disc’s case is designed to look like the cover of the J.D. Salinger classic Catcher in the Rye, and is called, what else?, J.D. Salinger. But lest you think that this is just a spunky band with good graphics, rest assured that the Riders put out some rocking tunes, in fact, lots o’ rockin’ tunes – there must be 50 of them on this disc alone. So thank God they’re good. You’ve got fast, thrashy, fuzzy, distortion-heavy, feedback-laden guitar. You’ve got speed of light timekeeping. You’ve got snarly, sneering, screaming, gives-you-a-sore-throat-just-listening-to-them vocals. They wanna be the Ramones, but they aren’t goofy enough. They sing about suburban angst, but without a fake British accent. They do a bit of the surf thing. The vocalist wants to be Kurt Cobain, but he can also sound like Iggy Pop. The Wynona Riders want to be a lot of things, but they wind up just being themselves. And that’s a good thing.