As the countdown continues, a Memphis savant makes the cut, while a pair of cranky roots-rockers get angry and eloquent:
38.
Album: Time Bomb High School — The Reigning Sound (In the Red, 2002)
My favorite Memphis album of the decade. Here’s a mash note I wrote at the time:
It seems odd to champion this intensely musical garage-rock masterwork as the year’s best local record, when, in fact, it’s one of the best records of the year, period, probably the second-best album to emerge from the newly revived garage-rock scene after the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells. What separates the Reigning Sound from almost every other band in their little corner of the world isn’t just that frontman Greg Cartwright has been doing this for a decade (and Time Bomb High School is a more impressive achievement than anything he did in much-loved previous bands the Oblivians and the Compulsive Gamblers). It’s that the band’s musical command seems to be on a higher plane: Time Bomb High School is an album concocted out of record-shop dust, built on a love of an era’s worth of musical culture, one in which echoes of great records past rattle in the crevices. And unlike so much of the backward-gazing in local music culture, it’s a testament to pop music, not folk music. For those who worship at the altar of the rotating, three-minute epiphany, Time Bomb High School is a Sunday kind of love indeed.
Song Sample: “She’s Bored With You”
