The Blakes cd review

The guys from The Blakes were nice enough to send me a copy of their new cd, which as best as I can tell is self-released and self-titled and available via their myspace page

The first thing that pops into my mind when I scroll through the tracks is there is a fair amount of diversity of the sounds available to the listener. Indeed, it initially feels like you could put a few of these cuts on a compilation and folks would assume they're by different bands.

There's a ragged, gut-bustin' side of them (tracks like "modern man" and the opener, "two times"). There's a slightly pulled back garage-pop side ("lie next to me" and "commit") and then there's a where the hell did that come from side (the synth poppy "lintwalk").

Take a dash of Jet, a bit of The Strokes, a smidge of White Stripes, some of the Kinks' noisy side, and possibly some unknown young rocker sitting at home wailing on his guitar in his bedroom listening to Little Steven's Underground Garage at 1am on a Sunday night and you've got something in the ballpark of The Blakes.

Overall I can see how I would like these guys a bit more in a live setting, where they would likely bring some raw, energetic guitar assault into my world. In spite of my initial assessment of the diversity of sounds on the disc, by the end of the listening the limited melody range and common instrument tones lead to a bit of same-ness. That said, there are some perfect songs here to put on your mp3 player for rocking out in shuffle mode.