The Dreadful Yawns reviewed
The Dreadful Yawns
Rest
(Exit Stencil)
It’s (pick one: stupid, lazy, comically shortsighted) to attach a young band to a 40-year-old song, but The Dreadful Yawns are everything right about The Byrds’ “Ballad Of Easy Rider.”
O.K., so the whole basis for this is the thumb-snapping, day-wasting “End Of Summer,” the last track on Rest, though it does encapsulate the feel of the Meat Puppets-esque (after they ditched the paper pills) openers “You’ve Been Recorded” and “Changing States.” Ben Gmetro has an ace vocalist in Dave Molnar to back him up; the duo’s harmonies feel not so much professional as brotherly, fueling a folksiness that doesn’t have an agenda (revivalism, alt-country, freak) and just assumes people will join hands and sing along. Anything remotely psychedelic comes from the outside, a sentimentality ushered in by invocations of Gram Parsons and the cosmic American era. Rest is pure and unfettered, it’s lolling, lazy folk pop and if it takes a cheap generalization to draw attention to it, so be it.
— Steve Forstneger
Click here to download “You’ve Been Recorded.”
