The seventh album from indie-pop stalwarts Quasi finds the band switching gears, straddling some weird punk-poptimist line between the New Pornographers and the New York Dolls. American Gong comes in the wake of a boatload of changes: the dissolution of co-vocalist Janet Weiss’s going concern, Sleater-Kinney; the folding of longtime label Touch & Go; and the addition of a third member — bassist Joanna Bolme — to a band that spent nearly 15 years recording as a duo.

Accordingly, American Gong is a completely different Quasi — none of the demented piano-pop of When The Going Gets Dark or smeary indie-jangle of Hot Shit — this is their debut as a big, ugly, crunchy, old-time rock ‘n’ roll band. Much, like Sleater-Kinney’s The Woods, R.E.M.’s Accelerate, or the entire Thermals catalog, this is the indie-rock version of wearing your old denim jacket, embracing the big dumb riffs you loved as a teen, but injecting them with an adult’s cynicism. “Repulsion” and “Bye Bye Blackbird” both have the distended garage-punk chug of classic Stooges, but rapidly detour into comically cheery, arena-ready, downright Aerosmithy harmonies. Sam Coombes’s sardonic bluster now either doubles as snottiness (“Blah blah blah said the tongue to the ear,”… read more »