Tough Age Keeps It Bashy

Tough Age is a garage rock band through and through. The local four-piece doesn't use unconventional time signatures, it prefers familiar-sounding chord progressions, and it never strays from its usual setup of two guitars, bass and drums. It avoids studio polish, instead preferring to record primarily live off the floor with a minimum of takes.

And yet, despite the group's apparent purism, Tough Age manages to cover an impressive amount of ground on its debut LP, out next week (Nov. 12) on Mint Records.

The self-titled disc opens with a blast of six-string fireworks, as "We're Both to Blame" introduces us to front-man Jarrett K.'s venomous snarl and his bandmates' combustible accompaniment. The song bears traces of the singer's prior project, the surf-oriented Korean Gut, but this time he's tamed his vicious guitar assaults and adapted them for a more hummable format; perhaps he learned a thing or two during his stint playing bass in Apollo Ghosts, another fantastic local rock act that split before its time.

The opening cut gives way to "The Heart of Juliet Jones," a doo wop-flavoured number filled with peppy handclaps and AM harmonies. It's a dead simple ditty that sounds like countless others, but the band's raw energy makes it an addictive piece of timeless pop.

Elsewhere on the album, "Open It Up" is a primal 12-bar blues jam with oblique lyrics that appear to reference suicide. Perhaps I'm reading into it too much, but I get the feeling that K's referring to slashing his wrists when he yells, "When your life's a mess you better open it up / When you're real depressed you better open it up." Eek!

The very next track, "Sea Horse," takes a softer approach, delivering Guided by Voices-style melodicism with a woozy shoe-gaze jangle. "I Waste Too Much Time on Myself" is similarly indebted to dream pop, but with a noisy psychedelic edge. And then there's closer "Hundo Pocket," a bubblegum punk basher that places the quartet firmly within Mint Records' lineage of awesomely scrappy pop bands.

In other words, Tough Age gets a hell of a lot of mileage out of decades-old approach. And as much as I admire boundary-pushing experimentalism, there's always room for another band with guitars and great tunes.