It’s kind of amazing: No matter what the top 40 landscape currently looks like, there will always be a place for rock ’n’ roll bands on major labels. Still, I was more than a little bit shocked when I got a press release this morning announcing that Louisville, Kentucky, garage-rock quintet White Reaper had signed on the dotted line with Elektra Records.
Don’t get me wrong: White Reaper kicks all sorts of ass. Their 2017 album The World’s Best American Band was jam-packed with fuzzy melodies, snotty attitude and a heaping helping of Thin Lizzy-esque dual-guitar leads. They felt a little out-of-place on the historically navel-gazing Polyvinyl Records roster, but stranger unions have existed. (Who remembers Hi-Fi And The Roadburners on Victory Records?)
But at the end of the day, White Reaper was just another band with 15,000 Facebook likes and a slammed tour schedule. Their fans were no more rabid than that of, say, Wavves, a somewhat similar-sounding group (who also had a major-label flirtation that ended poorly). To wit: The above press photo as well as this flyer, both featuring an Elektra Records logo — the first mentions anywhere of the band signing to a major — were each posted to the band’s Facebook page more than two months ago, and either no one noticed or no one cared.
“Might Be Right,” White Reaper’s first song under the Elektra banner sounds more or less like White Reaper. It’s slightly more polished (though there’s no mention of who produced it), and the music video feels like Elektra is trying to push the band into a Strokes-esque image, but it’s still enjoyable:
There’s no word on when a new album will be dropping, but if the band’s tour admat is any indication, it’s probably called You Deserve Love and it’s probably coming out this fall, barring potentially disastrous major label layoffs, restructuring and shelving of any project not designed to sell big in Q4 (but, I mean, when does that ever happen to a baby band on a big label?):
Today’s subject line is a lyric from the song “Free Energy” by Philadelphia slacker-pop quintet Free Energy, taken from their absolutely flawless debut album Stuck On Nothing, a ’70s AM radio-throwback released in 2010 and impeccably produced by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem. This band was basically White Reaper v1.0 — how they didn’t become the biggest rock band in the world is still a mystery to me. They’re on an indefinite hiatus of sorts; the last I saw, singer Paul Sprangers had embarked on a new path manufacturing organic eggplant jerky, but that seems to have fizzled out. Anyway. Listen to the song below, and if you dig it, you can buy the record it’s from on Amazon (and by clicking that link, there’s a chance I may make a few cents):
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