Well kids, I'm back - back in the frozen Mitten, writing this darn'd blog to keep my fingers warm! And what better to stave off frostbite than a bracing dose of punky power-pop? Thank goodness for Cheap Time. In all the garage-punk universe, there's no band as recklessly and unabashedly fun-lovin' as these merry hooligans. In a scene defined by shtiks - Nobunny with his bunny mask, King Khan and his James Brown affectations, Jay Reatard and his insistence on singing in that irritating cod-British accent - Cheap Time offer nothing but good old-fashioned teenage kicks. Cheap Time is the brainchild of Jeffery Novak (although calling something so instinctively infectious as this the "brainchild" of anything seems rather ridiculous), but this band's style of pinhead rock is doubtlessly a group effort. All sounds - guitar, bass, drums, vox, screech, drone, hum, hiss, warble - all mesh together to form a glammy firecracker of an album that sounds as though it was recorded on a tape recorder in a landfill. But hey, that's no dig - this is dynamite! It's Ramones-y, T.Rex-y, and, true to the name, even a bit Cheap Trick-y. This is power pop, light on the pop, if you please. The sing-song primitivism of "Too Late" only hints at the trashy throwdown to come, "People Talk" is a babbling, Britpunk-evoking thrill, and when the band tosses some hokey synthesizer bloops into the mix on the stomping "Zig-Zag", it only seems fitting for a band that apparently wants nothing more than to start a punky ruckus. They succeed, and gloriously.
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