Cheap Time

Add Date: May 8

Artist: Cheap Time

Album: Wallpaper Music

Label: In the Red

Genre: Rock, glam punk

Comments: I recall many years ago perusing a used bookstore's collection of CDs and eventually stumbling across a name I had actually heard before. Without letting the CD spin, I slid the cashier four dollars and cranked it up in the car as I drove home. My first thoughts were, wow, this guy really has a terrible voice; then, damn the Violent Femmes are genius. Perhaps Cheap Time is not quite yet on the level of the Femmes; however, Jeffrey Novak's grating vocals draw instant similarities to those of Gordon Gano, whom I so quickly wrote off as his voice issued out of my car's speakers.

Of the three most prolific band-spawning cities--Brooklyn, Austin and Nashville--Cheap Time hails from the latter. The band's glam-punk, fuzzed-out riffs tear through Nashville's country smog. Wallpaper Music races on, ignoring calls to slow down by substituting song after song of head-rocking, punk-rooted tracks. The album shuffles the current popular deck of Fleet Foxes, Mumford & Sons and other folk-inspired alternative albums, recalling the days of David Bowie and Lou Reed.

The LP begs to be listened through and through, but the highlights are tracks 1, 9 and 4.