Earl Greyhound Are My Masters Now

March is almost here. In fact, it arrives this week. So, it's a little late to write about an album that came out in August of last year, an album that I didn't even know about until December, and outside of the band's dedicated following and a brief mention in SPIN, an album that has received little attention.

The album is Soft Targets, the band is Earl Greyhound, and they are really, really fucking good.

Matt Whyte(guitars/vocals), Kamara Thomas(bass/vocals), and Christopher Bear(drums) form the power trio. And I do mean power. Soft Targets opening track "SOS" wastes no time getting things started. Whyte's voice soars over his grinding guitar and Bear's exploding drums. They achieve stunning depth for a band with only three members; you can listen to this album dozens of times and never grow tired.

Earl Greyhound take everything good about the golden era of hard rock, the rumbling epic sound of Led Zeppelin, the brazen yet subtle sexiness of Jimi Hendrix, the balls-out fun of AC/DC and the unapologetic glam rock posture of Queen and T. Rex. All of this without any sense of bullshit hipster irony. The play cock-rock because they fucking love it, and it shows. Soft Targets has no filler, all killer. From the ultra-catchy "Like A Doggy" and "Back And Forth", featuring Thomas and Whyte belting out a dual-vocal attack(though Thomas provides deep, beautiful howls and harmonizes with Whyte beautifully on nearly every track), to the epic eight minute stoner rock anthem "Monkey", this album...can you tell how much I love it yet...it just fucking rocks. "Monkey" and "Fashion" are hot sweaty fucks in song form. Whyte's guitar meshes with Thomas's bass perfectly. Behind Whyte's pyrotechnics Bear drums with passion and thunder; he didn't get the memo that nowadays drummers have to have ironic distaste for being flashy or showing off. J. Mascis would love the way he plays(not that he's dead, I just can't speak for him, he's busy recording a new Dinosaur Jr. album with Lou Barlow and Emmett Murphy which I can't wait for). This would have been my number one album, by far, last year if I had known better. I had their EP, but slept on the album. Few things do I regret more, possibly my first marriage, but it's close.

Go to their website, stream the album, and be converted. The buy it. If you're lucky, catch a live show(I will). As Thomas told SPIN:

"If you come to one of our shows," she says, "I promise your face will get ripped off."

A-fucking-men.

Video for "SOS"