Americana Music Reviews

 

Southern Backtones
The Formula

by David Pilot

You're gonna learn my name
It might not be tomorrow
You're gonna learn my name
It might not be tomorrow
When I breach your façade

With that take on the intoxicating sensuality an aloof woman can exude, the Southern Backtones rip into The Formula, a searing, winding, consuming journey into the mind of man adoring/despising woman. The Backtones, with their full-on blend of rockabilly, punk and psycho surf music interspersed by glimpses of musica de espana and lounge standards have already served notice that they're up to something different than any other band. Their first two discs, Los Tormentos de Amor and El Camino Peligroso, made that fact clear. The Formula insinuates itself into the psyche by bits and pieces, like the tendrils of kudzu taking over a porch, but minus the tranquility of the ubiquitous Southern plant.

"Sinful Refrain," penned by frontman Hank Schyma, goes straight for the Sergio Leone ambience, its Spanish guitar and horns lulling the senses like a siesta in Sierra Madre while its driving, almost martial percussion track infuses the beauty with a sense of impending cataclysm. The lyrics make it clear the rhythm section knows the outcome:

I have craved our sinful refrain
I could briefly hold your heart once again
We'll look down as we fall from grace
There we'll cheat our way to bliss
Won't that be great?

Schyma, bassist Mykel Foster and new percussion man Mike Blattel seem intent on taking The Formula places the first two albums never went. While using their literacy and sharp musical styles to take the Backtones' original incarnation to the pinnacle of the Houston music scene, Schyma and Foster never got too far away from the fun side of rock and roll. There was plenty of flirting with a Jim Morrison-like fatalistic approach to the business and life in general, but here the darkness of groupie life gets a far more serious investigation. Track titles like "Glamour Whore" and "Scream" make that obvious at a glance, and their themes of self-recrimination and desire to fit in deliver on the menace the names invoke. And the final track, "Make-Up," gets right to the bottom of the pit false love can become:

Open your gate. Remember the code?
Try star two seven two four.
Make it quick before I piss in my shorts
I'm not sure if I can love anymore
I'll try not to smear your makeup.

But the best cut here, hands down, is the title track. Go get the disc and read the lyrics for yourself; you won't find them here. But rest assured the track, clocking in at a healthy 4:18 and morphing through progressive and pertinent tempos, arrangements and volumes on its way, is the darkest, truest, most brutally honest inspection of a breakup you'll find anywhere.

The Formula is rock and roll you can learn from, and it's also music you can get good and drunk or high to. Perhaps therein is the disc's true lesson: everything in this world can be equally good or bad - - depending on how it's taken. The Southern Backtones have stayed true to their roots with this one, rocking like the world ends tomorrow and melding punk and Texas rockabilly with sounds no sane person would ever think would fit. It's an intense journey into the soul of darkness and the heart of rock and roll, and it's a hell of a lot of fun. As an added bonus, The Formula is surrounded by the absolute hands down best liner notes ever printed. Reading the lyrics and studying the pictures attendant with each track make it clear this was a labor of love. And some of these women, well, you and I both would give a lot to love.

For more info check out the Backtones' website, www.southernbacktones.com

Contact David Pilot at: tailgunner-at-rockzilla.net

 
Read Rockzilla's Guestbook
Sign Rockzilla's Guestbook