TB&TSS is the best contemporary blues rock band, as far as I am concerned. In general, I find them rivaled only by the Replacements (gotta love Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash). This is their latest release, "Pleasantly Plump", comprised of new songs plus re-recordings from other releases (many which are brutally documented in their second release: "Live: The New School (8th Floor)"
Plourde's voice and guitar work is sonically punishing and disorienting. Firm ground is provided by the rhythm section of Rosenberg (drums) and Wheeler (bass). The chaos of the music is an illusion achieved by arrangement. Each part is tight, logical, with the blues at its core, hilariously so at times. While the bass is walking, the drums are hopping; Plourde is screaming, and the guitar is churning out harmonic skeletons of dominant chords and their upper, dissonant extensions. These parts of logic supersaturate the music, yet the arrangement manipulates to the point at which the sense of structure and order becomes phantasmic; it almost sounds as if the music was shuffled together, confused in the synchronization of parts.
After you spend time with the material, crystals of sense start to form from the messy, boiling solution of parts melted together. The music starts to cool; the listener can now touch and examine. You learn to appreciate the dissonances between the parts, each level of crystal structure, and recognizing them as a new whole.
By taking the standard syntax of blues and rock forms and reshuffling their order, TB&TSS produces a new, noisier form. The logic is there: a product of smaller, more identifiable logics layered together into a new whole.
