Audio By Carbonatix
When Greg Cartwright, a garage-rock revival vet from way back before Rolling Stone caught wind and broke out the champagne, rinsed off his customary gravel with 2001’s folk-influenced Reigning Sound debut, he revealed himself a breezy, literate songwriter. Two albums later, we find Cartwright back under the burqa. Too Much Guitar prescribes one long rave-up, crude arrangements caramelized like all good “bad” recordings. And songwriting? The riffs and tunes are catchy as flypaper, but somewhere in the razor-thin spaces between the admitted overabundance of guitar, Cartwright may as well be singing in Navajo or Yiddish.
Too Much Guitar is a tribute to the crazed primitivism that today’s overhyped greaser-rock charade is sorely missing. It’s also one of those eyebrow-arching “Huh?” episodes that visionary musicians molt from their hides from time to time. But maybe at this hour of strange revelations — “garage rock” produced by corporations, and the horrifying resurrection of the word “progressive” uttered in reference to rock — we can do worse than a bold step backward.
