Highlights: A Stone’s Throw, Friend Of The Shooter, Buried
Treasures (It’s Not Out There), Sweet Dreams, Lisa
This is a brilliant
album, vast and expansive, steeped in the Arizonian sound they tend to call ‘desert
rock’. Huge sound, full of rough, Crazy Horse-styled guitar workouts and
undeniable melodic substance. Interestingly, Hopkins’ voice occasionally
reminds me of Tom Petty. Only the sort of gruff Tom Petty who was born in the dusty
desert and has no time for those sophisticated vocal mannerisms.
Buried Treasuries sticks to its sound right from the start and never
lets go, and since it is such a winning sound, gutsy and lush, – why not. For
some random reason I’m not too interested in the flashy opener, “Dark Side Of
The Spoon”, which sounds like a somewhat pedestrian take on a psychedelic
rocker from the 60’s. Also, “Good Morning” is basically a five minute (well,
almost) noise freakout – and I treat people who admire things like that with a
great deal of genuine suspicion.
But the rest of the songs
are uniformly stellar. Stuff like the title track or “Betcha Gotcha Now!” are
catchy as hell, and you won’t hear a better epic than the guilt-by-association
classic called “Friend Of The Shooter” in the whole of 2012. Hair-raising and
awe-inspiring, quite reminiscent of Neil Young’s “Like A Hurricane”.
Buried Treasures is a rock solid, no-nonsense monolith of an album, and it covers you
like an enormous sheet of thick desert sand. There’s also a bonus CD, but it’s
mostly made up of 30-second throwaways and pointless 15-minute jams. Stick to
the main thing.
8/10
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