Cattle Drums - The Boy Kisser Sessions +3

Cat­tle Drums
The Boy Kisser Ses­sions + 3
Tiny Engines; 2011

Yes, this will sound rather cheese­ball and/​or make me come across like an anachro­nis­tic old man, but the music of Cat­tle Drums makes me really nos­tal­gic for the years 1999 – 2002. In gen­eral, those times were filled with lots of angst, con­tra­dic­tions, and frus­tra­tion (i.e. big ques­tions about my edu­ca­tion, career, and belief sys­tems), but my music world opened up in untold direc­tions dur­ing that time, set­ting a foun­da­tion for who I am as both an appre­ci­a­tor and critic of music. Rev­el­ing in heart­felt pas­sions and rol­lick­ing rhythms, The Boy Kisser Ses­sions + 3 is a kinetic eight-​song record that calls to mind early mewith­outYou, At The Drive-​In, and that excit­ing, vibrant era of indie gui­tar rock as second-​wave emo was flirt­ing openly with punk and hard­core music.

I spent many hours dri­ving many miles up and down Inter­state 45 in a crappy grey 1989 two-​door Nis­san Sen­tra going to col­lege at Sam Hous­ton State Uni­ver­sity, going to work in a Chris­t­ian book/​music/​gift store, attend­ing shows in Hous­ton, TX, and then dri­ving back to Con­roe, TX where I used to live and go to church. I count it a high honor to describe this album as one that I would have played end­lessly on repeat in my car stereo. My heart would have exulted in the brash com­bi­na­tion of punk, hard­core, emo, and south­ern gothic sen­si­bil­i­ties, as snaking gui­tar parts danced with an ener­getic rhythm sec­tion, while I screamed along with the earnest bleat of the lead vocals.

There’s noth­ing whiny or sad-​sack about emo of this nature – much like their prog­en­i­tors, these are tough guys who are also aware of their feel­ings. Along with the ear­lier bands I men­tioned, ram­pant swathes of Braid, Fugazi, Pedro The Lion, and vin­tage Mid­west­ern emo fuel­ing songs like “Who Punched Pat Moore’s Face,” “Sluts And Coconuts,” “Bovrg The Nag,” and “Just The Right Height.” The tunes are rock­ing through­out, and the band pays care­ful atten­tion to how they each work together to pro­vide a cogent, com­plete musi­cal thought.

The Boy Kisser Ses­sions + 3 is fan­tas­ti­cally vin­tage in ori­en­ta­tion, but it pos­sesses its own teeth and per­son­al­ity – noth­ing here feels a lame sound-​alike or an archaic cliché. Cat­tle Drums rightly joins con­tem­po­raries like Every­one Every­where, Tigers Jaw, and Mon­u­ment (not to men­tion the whole ros­ter of Top­shelf Records) in bring­ing this long-​derided style of indie rock head­long into today’s music cul­ture. I am really excited to hear the debut full-​length these five guys have planned for the lat­ter half of 2011.