The Means

Vil/Viol (Doubleplusgood)
by Craig Regala

Hissing, barking, drilling and sputtering cantankerousness splattershot through a hard-nose garage template that doesn’t ignore the past twenty or so years like many do. They don’t do anything dumb either; everything fits nicely. Using a basic guitar/bass/drums/singer setup, they bash along without resorting to tired “good ole” bar punk. That shit’s just creeping up my ass big time. Get past watering down the Stooges/MC5/Dolls back into the tedium it sprung from, please. The Means, like the Chicago bands The Nerves and The Dishes, or the late, great Brainiac, or even their Columbus, Ohio contemporaries, Grafton, have a voice and identity. They also have a couple tunes you could chuck between The Hives clipped Mod/New Wave garage hunch, The Strokes New York cool version of Violent Femmes and The White Stripes decon/recon/demo-as-duo roots chattering. Yeah, it’s a little rougher than that stuff, but so’re you, right?
(PO Box 18721 Minneapolis, MN 55418)