Love & Curses

We Say...

Review by Lenny Kaye

There can never be Too Much Guitar, but on the last Reigning Sound studio album (titled thusly in 2004), it did seem as if the balancing act that is Greg Cartwright's musical breadth was being mixed into mono. As a member of Memphis' well-traveled Oblivians (I remember a jaw dropping show in the late '90s at the Continental in New York), and later the Stones-ish alt-country of the early let-it-Reigning Sound, he has slithered away from easy classification, despite the narrowcasting of the term "garage" and the group's purposefully rough edges. Playing Red Bird houseband to Mary Weiss on her long-awaited solo debut seems to have given the Reigning Sound a way out of its cul-de-sac, and Love and Curses is wide-ranging, satisfying, and most of all, heartfelt.

That's the trick, to take the eternal verities that define no-frills classique rock and get past the readymades you've heard too many times before. For me, garagephonic, bless its blast, has always been about the inspiration and later for the fuzz-atonal and three-chord howl. As the Reigning Sound's cover of "Stormy Weather" on Time Bomb High School (2003) shows, fusing elements of doo-wop and cumulonimbus guitar, Cartwright tends to go straight to the eye of the whirling wind-tunnel, confronting his emotions full-on, letting them carry him far beyond the slamming six-strings you expect from the Reigning Sound's live albums (at Maxwell's he made do with half that number with no loss of all-out assault).

Greg has been at this long enough where he's not after shock value or posturing; "Love Won't Leave You A Song," he sings, though such obvious contradiction becomes its own means to an end. He frees himself amidst the chimes of "The Bells" — "I wander alone without compass or direction," catching a bit of Dylan's early-electric run-on sentencing, a touchstone also referenced in "Something To Hold Onto," helped along by a lush Kooperesque organ. And for those who just want to put their head down and ram it through a door, a la Richard and the Young Lions, there's "Is It True?" 'Tis.