"Without doubt, this is the band's coming of age."
by Mark S. Tucker for Folk And Acoustic Music Exchange October 27, 2012
Sweet! The second of four DNC (no, good lord!, not the Democratic National Convention but Drivin' N' Cryin') EPs has arrived, following on Songs from the Laundromat (here). As the boyz themselves exclaim, the influences this time around are The
Kinks, The Who, Count Five, The Ramones, and others, and that baseline shows without mercy in Songs about Cars, Space, and the Ramones. Raucous, loud, energetic, and in your face with more than a little shirtsleeve snottiness, the band has found its zone. Catch, for instance, the killer Cars guitar line in Moonshot. Brilliant! Takes the song up a whole 'nother notch in a nasty, dirty, futuristic contrast to the driving grunge of the basic format. Then jump over to the manic lead slipped in by Cheetah Chrome in Out Here in
the Middle of Nowhere, a very Seeds-y
cut. Ah, but the closer, Space Eyes, is a cross between the Ventures and Ronnie Montrose's take on Town without Pity a la Wayne Cochran and the C.C. Riders, almost Ennio Morricone-esque. The most interesting facet to what may seem to be a jumble of sounds, though, is how damn well DNC makes it all hang together. What they inherited from Pete Townshend, Ray Davies, 'n da Ramones gaggle dovetails cleanly into a driving, rockin', gut level exposition erupting from what has slowly been working into a signature marrying pop to Brit Invasion rokk to punky urgency, the result filling up all the spaces in their evolutionary timeline. Without doubt, this is the band's coming of age.