by One of Brooklyn’s most celebrated unsigned live rock ‘n’ roll bands, Short Porch, deliver with their debut album, Hot and Ready. It’s a rollicking, heavy riffing arrival that Beavis and Butthead could quite happily snap their necks head-banging along to.
The Skinny: The perils of closing time at the bar, riding around New York City on a horse, and doomsday prepping with a shotgun that you don’t know how to fire are all subjects that grace this punchy paroxsym of a debut. They bless it with a sense of both laughable irreverence and an eerie feeling that it is a prescient pasquinade of a future not too far from the present.
The band even admit that songs like ‘Final Human’ started as a stupid joke before the maddening world edged them closer to serious satire. But that’s also the crowning triumph of the record: somehow, from the wailing guitars and comically off-kilter lyrics, you’re instilled with the refreshing feeling of friends in their cappuccino years kicking out the jams while they still can.
Augmented by Sean McNulty’s unique, characterful delivery and a real sense of ego-free originality, the string-snapping, cymbal-crashing indie world of Hot and Ready is a blitzkreig that all but barrels you down to the nearest bar even though you were curled up on the sofa contemplating life just moments ago.
The Verdict: The decidedly daring DIY production imbues Hot and Ready with a sense that Short Porch are the last live (and living) band on Earth. They subvert the nostalgia of songs like ‘Surrender’ by Cheap Trick with wry neorealism in a fresh, thrasy, careworn way, giving the impression that this is a rock ‘n’ roll classic unstuck in time, eschewed from the late 1970s for being set in 2037, and not taking itself seriously enough, dude.
