C Average

Second Reckoning (Kill Rock Stars)
by Craig Regala

Whoa! This is the tits! Your tits, my tits, everybody’s tits! Peeling off a charged-up heavy sound tangled between the first Rush album, the Who’s Live At Leeds, and long-gone hero’s Dust, C Average go for the big sound with two guys. The singing is kept back in the mix, the fat sustain, reamped exit wounds of hard rocks birth from ’67 garage rock and burnt over just post psychedelia works great.

Take stuff like Captain Beyond, Lucifer’s Friend and Uriah Heeps’ most lucid riffs, get ‘m regunked by guys who banged out indie-era Monster Magnet and late period Black Flag tunes waiting for the rest of the band to show up for practice, and boil ‘m down and turn ‘m loose. I can only hope there are a dozen duos out there reworking rock terrain so effectively. The alloy has a metal feel but no sheen, organic and epic, like Manowar stripped to two guys covering garage rock classics with Tolkien replacing Frazetta as prime reference. I hear the first record is heavier on ’70s rock covers: Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” merges with Queen’s “Ming’s Theme,” and ZZ Top gets covered. THIS is the band Queens of the Stone Age should take with ‘m to befuddle the masses.
(120 NE State Ave. PMB 418 Olympia, WA 98501)