Drug Rug
S/T

Black and Greene Records 2007

By ignore staff

Propelled by their power to slow to the earth’s crawl and throw dirty jam tantrums in its face, the cute couple called Drug Rug has succeeded in getting our attention. Theirs is the sound of youth’s finite summer-fun days, of hanging out in backyards and driving Honda hand-me-downs to score along coastal highways, as a foreboding enigma lurks underneath the quilt in the backseat.

The vocal interplay between Tommy Allen and Sarah Cronin has an adorably blind quality in its commitment to free spirited craziness and off-kilter, sun-fractured folk rock that recalls Beck’s One Foot in the Grave. On a little ode to mortality entitled “Day I Die” Cronin uses her fall on a windowpane to open up a loser worldview that builds into a rallying celebration of loud, twanging melodic guitar and sandy percussion. It’s like a girl who goes from crying face down in a pillow to combusting into a seizure of long legs, hysterical laughter and leftover tears.

Recorded in their state of Massachusetts, Drug Rug’s debut album is most notable for its gravely, murky sonics that will have you searching for the rocky bottom with a cold belly full of Schlitz. The murk works. All nine songs simultaneously perk and clog your ears, making you want to work harder to enjoy them more. The extra grit and catchy sing-a-longs catapult a starry-eyed duo that could have been yet another acoustic exercise in bangs-over-eyes choreographed love into a laudable rock act that we’ll be looking for on festival bills like a lighter in a pocket on one of those eponymous dingy Baja sweaters.

This discourse of Drug Rug's self-titled album is written for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.

 
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