Power and Strife
Artist: Silver Cities
Label: Velet Blue Music
Length: 11 tracks / 31:32

Silver Cities was a true godsend to remedy a recent musical malady.

A few days ago I was in a record store—it happened to be a Christian bookstore, which may have been a large part of the problem—to search for some new music to buy for a friend. I was quite disgusted with the
cookie-cutter sounds clunking out of the in-store CD player as I plugged in (no exaggeration) about a dozen demo CDs for a listen. There was literally nothing worth passing on to a friend. In fact, I was so shook up from the bland music I heard that as I walked to my car, I repeated to myself, “Holy crap, I need to hear some good music. I NEED to hear some DIFFERENT music!” Enter Power and Strife.

With Jaggeresque vocal swagger and deliberately unmolested instrumental production, Silver Cities chooses to unleash energetic, raw rock ‘n’ roll—bare, bright and under glaring house lights—instead of obscuring the songs with overly-creamy production and formulaic delivery. Anthem choruses like, “Shotgun shells and the trials of your life” (“Power and Strife”), “All you rock ‘n’ roll hipsters, all you late night scenesters / Are you dancing?” (“Emergency”), and “This town is anti-climactic / This street’s so anti-climactic / Our dreams are ultra-fantastic” (“Anti-climactic”), beg for fist-pumping, sing-a-long listeners to join Silver Cities in their effort to slap some defibrillator pads on the sunken chest of rock ‘n’ roll.

RIYL: The Deadlines, The Jam, Squad Five-O, The Strokes, Maxeen

Greg Adams
08/28/07